By Grace Hogsten
Copy Editor
Last month, Netflix unceremoniously trotted out a new live special from Joe Rogan titled “Burn the Boats,” in which the infamous comedian delivers jokes pulled from the scripts of every podcaster and devil’s advocate who came before him.
“Burn the Boats” is an hour of Rogan talking about anything that will get him a cheap laugh. Between jokes about genitalia and anal probing, Rogan laments the fact that Hitler is no longer a popular Halloween costume and revisits the well of his cold takes on gay men and transgender women.
To anyone with a discerning eye, Rogan’s strategy is obvious: he lists controversial opinions to mask the fact that his work is completely devoid of craft.
According to Vulture, “There’s no need for polish when the goal is outrage fodder past its expiration date.”
One particularly dated punchline came at the end of a joke about navigating TSA as Rogan said, “Did you just assume my gender?”
While this tired line is overly familiar to anyone who logged onto Twitter or set foot on a middle school campus in 2016, Rogan’s audience laughs and applauds him as if he is not telling jokes they have all heard a hundred times before.
According to Variety, Rogan’s “invocations of culture-war wedge issues bring him attention he would otherwise not have merited.”
Throughout “Burn the Boats,” Rogan complains about the rules his “woke” detractors impose on him in the same breath that he disregards them; he uses several slurs during the special and then bemoans how “unfortunate” it is that he is not allowed to say them.
In a commentary video on Rogan, YouTuber D’Angelo Wallace said, “It’s so funny watching people like Joe Rogan…think that they’re really ‘owning the libs’ by calling them woke…Now what? Where do we go from here?”
Just as Rogan plays on the prejudices that have provided material and cheap laughs to uninventive comedians for years, Netflix platforms him to make some quick cash.
The special’s live stream format itself appears to be an additional tactic for Netflix to publish Rogan’s unedited ramblings with supposedly clean hands.
According to Variety, “It’s likely that, were his special pre-recorded, the streamer would have had some internal debate about what to cut — allowing the tape to run let them off the hook, and allowed Rogan to continue his shtick.”
Again and again, Rogan seeks his audience’s approval through shock value and by affirming the beliefs they hold but may not voice as loudly as he does.
“The level of mediocrity that has enabled Joe Rogan to exist and persist needs to be studied,” Wallace said.
Rogan’s career is a statement on the allure of money, fame, and complacency. His material is not original and his jokes are not funny, yet he has a huge following begging for more hours of content disparaging marginalized groups, and corporations are happy to invest in that.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo Caption: Joe Rogan, host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” ventures onto the comedy scene with his controversial Netflix stand-up special.