Netflix has found a temporary solution to the gap between Dave Chappelle specials.
Chappelle, a legendary contemporary comedian whose legacy has been complicated by the transphobic material in his Netflix specials, has helped make clear that the streaming service is primarily interested in getting attention at any cost. What’s complicated and sad about Chappelle’s recent material is that he’s a generational comedic storyteller who seems compelled by his beliefs to speak out against trans people. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan, whose new Netflix special “Burn the Boats” premieres on August 3, is clearly a kind of Chappelle in reverse. He’s not a generational comedian, or even a very good actor, but his invocation of culture war issues is getting him attention he otherwise wouldn’t have deserved.
This is no revelation. Rogan—whose early career included acting on the sitcom “NewsRadio,” hosting the reality show “Fear Factor,” and backstage interviews at UFC fights—has risen to this level by asserting that he is counterintuitive, outspoken, and strategically unthinking. On Rogan’s Spotify podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” his early Covid-era experiments in discrediting vaccines—less a crusade and more a pointless verbal rambling about whether vaccines might be safe, based on little more than a professional comedian’s instinct for deciding which button to push—have caught his attention. And that’s the currency that brought him to Netflix, and that prompted Netflix to stream him live.
It’s likely that had the special been pre-taped, the host would have had some internal debate about what to cut—let the tape play and let them get away with it, and let Rogan continue his gimmick as the most dangerous man in comedy. He certainly has an easy, fluid way with insults, incorporating them into his own way of seeing the world. I was really impressed when, in a flash, he went from saying that there’s nothing wrong with two straight men using homophobic insults in a private phone conversation to shouting that there’s no such thing as a private phone conversation because, in a squeaky-clean tone, “they’re definitely listening!” Rogan, who over the years has come to resemble the UFC fighters he once covered, was, at this point in the special, sweat dripping through his shirt, but the transition from needy self-justification to the global conspiracy against him seemed sweatless, practically seamless. His resentment is his own—and coincidentally, the world’s fault. It’s that simple.
Throughout the special, Rogan seems to be addressing or anticipating a hypothetical critic—so much so that his criticism feels like playing into his own game. It seems naive to take Rogan’s claims, point by point, as a comedy. It’s a mix of obnoxious cruelty (his description of a “pregnant man” breastfeeding a stranger’s baby was a failure), faux naivety (complaining about how “the world has gotten weird” when Rogan himself is the prime mover in shaping American culture), and, ultimately, a sensitivity that seems a decade too late. Aside from the Covid theme—which Rogan mentions at the top has changed many of his personal relationships (one wonders why!)—this special doesn’t seem to be able to address similar cultural wedges in 2013, right down to Rogan complaining that he can’t use certain insults. (By putting these on Netflix, Rogan has ensured that his audacity will win him the headlines that his comedy couldn’t, and thus his paycheck.)
Much of Rogan’s comedy, here, was simplistic to the point of sketching. Rogan sarcastically referred to at least some trans people as “crazy people,” saying that while some trans people were legitimate, countless others were like the villain in “The Silence of the Lambs”; this is not only biased, it’s amateurish. The subsequent segment about feeling afraid of gay men because of Rogan’s understanding of the primitive nature of men felt similar: outdated. Tired. In the end, it came as a relief, even to a viewer who disagreed, when Covid came up in Rogan’s rant, if only because it was a topic that hadn’t already been chewed over by the culture like so many of the viscera in “Fear Factor”: Rogan, in his description, didn’t go so far as to reject vaccines. But he has mocked those who care about the issue on both sides, those who believe in science with his sarcastic mockery of Prince Harry’s criticism of it, and those who believe in Joe Rogan with this: “If you’re taking my advice on the vaccine, is it really my fault?” Throughout, Rogan is odd-eyed and irritable; his large frame keeps him somewhat glued to the stage, but he suggests as best he can that he doesn’t take anything seriously other than following the joke. He’s constantly walking toward the line—as when he praises conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, while suggesting that he was wrong about “one big thing”—but he doesn’t seem curious enough to interrogate what he finds interesting about him, or his audience, about pushing these boundaries. It’s just plain fun, like telling transgender jokes from 1998.
He doesn’t often find it as he pleases: To the uninitiated, Rogan in this special comes across as somewhat inept, and Netflix seems to have streamed it more to cash in on his fame than to give him pride of place among other recent live events on the streaming platform like the Chris Rock special or the Tom Brady slam. But give him this much: Rogan is at least moderately complicated. He may not be as eccentric and mysterious as Chappelle, but he’s not just partisan. He complains, in the tone of a disloyal friend, that the worst coverage of his comedy club purchase came from Fox News (they referred to it as an “anti-woke” barrage, while he claims there was no political value at all). He essentially denies everything he’s ever said—not that he’s changed his mind, but he seems to dismiss the notion of having a brain at all. He complains that the media “will take things I said when I was very drunk and put them in quotes, like they were carefully thought out.”
Unfortunately, thinking things through—onstage, in the semi-privacy of a studio, or live on air—is what comedians get paid to do. And in his total denial of his work even as it happens, Rogan shows that for all his Netflix comedian chops, he lacks a fundamental quality that the best comedians share: courage.
