Six years after his last stand-up special, one year after opening his Austin club Comedy Mothership, and deep into his $250 million deal with Spotify, Joe Rogan is back on the comedy stage with the Netflix special, Burn the Boats. Ironically, the best thing Rogan has in his favor is the fact that he’s never been known as that good of a comedian. Host, fighter, conversationalist, salesman, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist? He’s absolutely great at those things. But in the art of stand-up comedy, he’s no George Carlin or Dave Chappelle. He’s somewhere between Dane Cook and Brendan Schaub, and Burn the Boats sadly does nothing to change that.
Burn the Boats is the latest in Netflix’s live endeavors, following the successful Netflix Is a Joke festival with The Roast of Tom Brady, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., and Katt Williams’ special, Woke Foke. This, combined with the fact that Rogan is a whipping boy for left-wing mainstream audiences and has a long history of silly mistakes, initially adds a bit of danger and anticipatory glee to the comedy special, which quickly fades. It ends up about as dangerous as a pimply high schooler asking for a dance at prom, and the topics Rogan touches on are similarly underdeveloped and awkward.
Aliens, Drugs, and D*cks
Rogan begins with placating the Texas audience and discussing weed; he later mentions cocaine, acid, and mushrooms with the same energy as a chuckling college freshman. Been there, done that. He discusses aliens, evolution, Fear Factor, and homophobia, and all of them somehow have to do with d*cks. He seems obsessed with penises the same way Amy Schumer’s awful comedy is obsessed with vaginas.
Rogan talks about men at length with little insight, wisdom, charm, or humor. He yells, “I love gay men, but I think about gay men the same way I think about mountain lions. I’m happy they’re real, but I don’t want to be surrounded by them. They’re a bunch of dudes who f*ck dudes, I don’t like my chances!”
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Joe doth protest too much? It’s jokes like that which pretend to be ‘common sense’ and ‘relatable’ instead of homophobic, but even if it wasn’t homophobic, it’d still be unfunny. It’s just narcissistic and weird. It blends in with all the other traditional “look at me, I said something naughty, ain’t I a bad boy” cancel culture stuff like the interminably clichéd and boring Ricky Gervais — joking about his assumed gender, not being able to say slurs, and how kids could dress as Hitler for Halloween when he was growing up. It’s all so boring. There are seeds of jokes in all of this, but Rogan never does the work to let them grow. Instead, he just yells about cocks and complains that he can’t say the N-word.
Don’t Take His Advice! Joe Rogan and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
He tries desperately to seem like an average sane man in an increasingly insane world, rather than a billionaire who can influence millions of young men’s minds. “Don’t take my advice!” he shouts, refusing any responsibility. It’d be truly malicious and cynical if he wasn’t just such a genuinely dumb person, almost to an adorable degree, like an accidentally racist puppy. He doesn’t have a grasp on reality despite screaming about being one of the last sane people left. He says:
“I get why the young people want to be woke, I really do. The old people f*cked up the world, so let’s try communism. I get it. You don’t know any better, I get it, you’re young. I get it. And also, people desperately want to be on a team. We’re tribal, and there’s only two teams in this country. There’s the left and the right. You know, you don’t want to be independent.”
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Like all of his many errors, he literally doesn’t know that there have been more registered independents than “the left and the right” for many years, and it’s at an all-time high. He doesn’t know that the vast majority of young people don’t want communism whatsoever, they’re just fed up with the inequalities of capitalism and, at the most extreme, some of them want democratic socialism. But Rogan’s worldview has never been defined by the world, reality, logic, science, etc. It’s been shaped by long conversations with weirdos and comedians. So it’s tragically ironic when Rogan says at one point, seemingly unaware of his own Dunning-Kruger effect:
I hate dumb people that are wrong and confident.
The words of a man who’s become a better joke than one he can tell. First as tragedy, then as farce, Joe. Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats premiered Aug. 3, 2024, on Netflix and is streaming through the link below: