Joe Rogan, the podcast superstar who’s come under fire at times for slinging racial slurs and spreading conspiracy theories, performed a live one-hour Netflix comedy special Saturday night. Looking like a jacked-up Uncle Fester of The Addams Family, the insanely popular Rogan delivered exactly the comedic content that his many fans (and critics) assumed he would.
Little that transpired in “Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats” pushed artistic boundaries.
Let’s put it this way: Little that transpired in “Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats” pushed artistic boundaries. Nor did much happen that might increase its star’s crossover appeal. The Chinese-American accents, the gags about pregnant men, the shout-outs to Alex Jones and Elon Musk, the use of the R-word, F-word (and strategic avoidance of the N-word), alongside a lot of LGBTQ-themed barbs — all of that might grow his massive fan base, but it certainly won’t diversify it. Presumably, that wasn’t the aim.
It’s the immensity of that fan base that I find most interesting about Rogan. In fact, the sociologist in me finds it more interesting than Rogan himself. During one of his bits about gay people, he sermonized: “Listen folks, if you want equal love, you have to have equal jokes cause that’s how we find out if you’re annoying. If we can’t joke around about you, we know you take yourself too fucking seriously.”
My first question here: Who’s “we”?
A clue emerged at set’s end when Rogan exchanged high fives with the entire front row, as best I could tell, a representative sample of his own audience. According to the data, 71% of his viewership is male, 64% is white, (a quarter, interestingly, is Hispanic) and its average age is 24. Single and unmarried men flock to him in droves. Rogan’s commercial genius has been to solicit, grow and migrate this lucrative cohort back and forth across platforms, ranging from UFC to reality television to podcasting, and stand-up.
Making sense of a cultural phenomenon as gargantuan as Joe Rogan is not easy (this essay by Aja Romano provides a thoughtful premier about the challenges). One way to think about it is to flip perspectives. Instead of approaching his jokes as reflecting Rogan’s obsessions, what if they actually reflect those of his fans?
There’s a sociological theory about prophets which might be helpful here. It holds that prophets are figures who may actually be saying, quite unconsciously, what their listeners want them to say. I’ll spare the reader a disquisition on Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, but their writings raised the possibility that prophesies emerge from the passions of the prophet’s audience, not from the prophet. The prophet unknowingly gives voice to their desires (and mistakes them as personal revelations from God).
If Rogan is a mouthpiece for his fan’s interests, then what did his special teach us about those who adore him? For starters, Roganites love “boys will be boys” humor. The comedian wondered why only male executives — and never female executives — couldn’t resist pleasuring themselves during Covid-era Zoom calls. More material about men behaving badly emerged in a riff about a cradle-robbing, 102-year-old grandpa freebasing Viagra so as to hook up with 75-year-old women down at the nursing home.
Judging by Rogan’s content, his fans certainly want to hear their comedian/prophet expound on the gender and sexuality issues of the day. Heterosexual men, the comic quipped (to considerable applause), are about to go extinct. Rogan recounts how he was randomly selected for additional screening at an airport security line. He bristled at a female TSA agent who asked for a “male assist” to pat him down. “Did you just assume my gender?,” he accused with mock outrage.
The trolling continued as Rogan reviewed his track record around Covid misinformation. “I’m a professional shitalker,” he confessed, “Don’t take my advice.” Boys just want to have fun — even when misleading millions of other boys in the process!








