Joe Rogan’s ‘Burn the Boats’: A Self-Styled Provocateur’s Jokes Feel Decades Too Late

Netflix has found the stopgap solution for the periods between Dave Chappelle specials.

Chappelle, the modern-legend comedian whose legacy has been complicated by the anti-trans material in his Netflix specials, has helped to clarify that the streaming service primarily cares about eyeballs at any cost. What is complicated, and heartbreaking, about Chappelle’s recent material is that he is a generationally gifted comic storyteller who seems compelled by belief to speak out against trans people. Meanwhile, what seems clear about Joe Rogan, whose new special, “Burn the Boats,” aired live on Netflix Aug. 3, is that he’s a sort of inverse Chappelle. He is not a generationally gifted comedian, or even a very good one, but his invocations of culture-war wedge issues bring him attention he would otherwise not have merited.

This is not a revelation. Rogan — whose early career included acting on the sitcom “NewsRadio,” hosting the reality show “Fear Factor,” and backstage interviews for UFC fights — has risen as far as he has by making a point of being counterintuitive, blunt, strategically mindless. On Rogan’s Spotify podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” his early-COVID-era experiments in discrediting vaccines — less a crusade than aimless verbal noodling about whether vaccines might or might not be safe, based on little more than a career comedian’s instinct for which button to push — got him attention. And that’s the currency that brought him to Netflix, and that prompted Netflix to broadcast him live.

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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 as the most dangerous man in comedy. It’s certainly true that he has an easy and facile way with a slur, and with merging it into his particular way of seeing the world. I was genuinely impressed when he pivoted, in a moment, from saying that there’s nothing wrong with two straight men using a homophobic slur in a private phone conversation to screeching that there is no such thing as a private phone conversation because, in screeched tones, “they definitely listen!” Rogan, who has through the years come to resemble the UFC fighters he once covered, had, by this point in the special, sweated through his shirt, but the transition from needy self-justification to global conspiracy against him seemed unsweaty, practically seamless. His resentments are his own — and it just so happens that, incidentally, they’re the world’s fault. Simple as that. 

Throughout the special, Rogan seemed to be addressing or anticipating a hypothetical critic — so much so that criticizing him seems to be playing into his game. It seems naive to address, point by point, Rogan’s claims in the form of comedy. It’s an admixture of nasty cruelty (his description of the child of a “pregnant man” nursing was a failed-comic grotesque), faux-naivete (complaining about how “the world got weird” when Rogan himself is a prime mover in shaping American culture), and, ultimately, a sensibility that seems 10 years late. Beyond the subject of COVID — which Rogan notes up top changed many of his interpersonal relationships (one wonders why!) — little in this special feels like it couldn’t have addressed similar cultural wedges in 2013, right down to Rogan’s complaint that he can’t use certain slurs. (In getting those onto Netflix’s air, Rogan guaranteed his audacity would win the headlines his comedy could not, and earned his paycheck.)

Much of Rogan’s comedy, here, was simplistic to the point of sketched-out. Rogan spoke mockingly of at least some trans people as “crazy people,” saying that, while some transness is legitimate, untold others were like the villain of “The Silence of the Lambs”; this is not only prejudiced, this is amateur stuff. A later bit about feeling intimidated around gay men because of Rogan’s understanding of men’s primal nature felt similar: Outdated. Tired. It ultimately came as a relief, even for the viewer who disagreed, when COVID came up in Rogan’s litany, if only because it was a topic that hadn’t already been chewed up by the culture like so many pieces of offal on “Fear Factor”: Rogan, in describing it, wouldn’t go so far as to disavow vaccines. But he mocked those who care about the issue on either side, those who believe in the science by his sneering mockery of Prince Harry’s critique of him, and those who believe in Joe Rogan this way: “If you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?” Throughout, Rogan has antic, darting eyes; his blocky physicality keeps him fairly glued to the stage, but he’s signaling as best he can that he takes nothing seriously but the pursuit of the punchline. He continually walks up to a line — as when he praises the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, while noting he was wrong about “one big thing” — but doesn’t seem curious enough to interrogate what in him, or in his audience, finds intriguing about pushing this boundary. It’s simply fun to do, just like telling trans jokes from 1998. 

He doesn’t find it as often as would suit: To the uninitiated, Rogan comes across in this special as somewhat inept, and it seems that Netflix broadcast it live to capitalize on his notoriety more than to give him pride of place among other recent live events on the streamer, like a Chris Rock special or the roast of Tom Brady. But give him this much: Rogan is at least mildly complicated. He may not be the odd and chewily enigmatic figure Chappelle is, but he’s not solely a partisan. He complains, in the tone of a betrayed friend, that the worst coverage of his having purchased a comedy club came from Fox News (they referred to it as an “anti-woke” salvo, while he claims there was no political valence at all). And he disavows basically everything he’s ever said — not that he has changed his mind, but he seems to write off the concept of having a mind at all. He complains that the media “would take things that I had said drunk, high as fuck — put them in quotes, as if it was a thought-out statement.”

Unfortunately, thinking things out — onstage, in the semi-privacy of one’s studio, or on streaming — is what comedians are paid to do. And, in utterly disavowing his own work even as it’s happening, Rogan shows that, for all he may have the trappings of a marquee Netflix comic, he lacks a fundamental quality the best comics share: Courage.