In his new Netflix live special, Burn the Boats, Joe Rogan imagines himself as a global court jester, a just-having-fun provocateur with a pert little “Did I do that?†approach to important issues of the day. It’s a game of inescapable blamelessness: If he’s right about all the stuff he’s yelling about, then great! Hope you had a good time. If he’s wrong, you’re the idiot for listening to him, and whatever — it’s just jokes! This is obviously an obnoxious approach to public commentary, but just as important in the context of Burn the Boats, it produces an underwhelming, exhausting, and lazily derivative hour of stand-up.
“There’s such a thin veneer on this society,†Rogan tells the audience about 50 minutes into the hour. He has just explained to the crowd that a DNA test told him that he has 57 percent more Neanderthal in his genetic makeup than most people, and he’s been thinking about how close we all are to cave people. “That’s why you have those thoughts,†he says. “You know those thoughts you have where you’re like, I can’t believe I’m thinking that, because I would never do that?†He goes on to describe ideas that he’s sure everyone has all the time: Why not mow down some scooters that are dodging around you in traffic? What if you grabbed a cop’s gun while he stands in line in front of you at Starbucks? “I don’t know why I was thinking that!†he says after describing a fantasy about men murdering each other on the way to Mars. But he was thinking it, and he really wants to say it out loud.
Rogan is outlining what he sees as a universal human experience, a fundamental explanation for why society is designed the way it is. We’re at the mercy of our violent cave-people brains, he says, and the world needs homeowners’ associations and IRS payments to distract us from our basest selves. Presumably, this is a compelling perspective about the world for much of his audience, but it’s mostly a way for him to paint a self-portrait. Throughout Burn the Boats, Rogan continually falls into what he describes as rabbit holes: stretches on gender, wokeness, trans people, conspiracy theories, evolution, and the difference between how men and women think about being gay. But he’s not righteously mad or ideologically invested. He’s just got all these thoughts in his head — a map of his own intrusive images, weird hang-ups, and cultural taboos — and he’s got to get them out. He’s not sure if they’re true or not, and he doesn’t care either way. He doesn’t think about what happens if millions of people then listen to him and believe him. As long as they laugh when he says it and he gets as much attention as possible, he’s just doing his thing. He gets to pretend he’s too dumb to be held responsible, and he also gets to wink at how dumb we all are for taking him seriously.
Rogan’s aware of his enormous reach. The Joe Rogan Experience is so popular that its listener numbers blow other huge podcasts out of the water, and it’s become a primary source of news and information for the comedian’s legion of fans. Still, the message of Burn the Boats is that everyone should just be chill about this. It’s boring that he should have to be careful about what he says just because he’s enormously influential. “Take this advice: Don’t take my advice,†he says. His quotes get taken out of context because people “take things that I’d said drunk, high as fuck, and they’d just put it in quotes.†Don’t take his advice about COVID, he says. Don’t listen to him about vaccines. Don’t pay attention to anything he says that happens to sound racist, because he swears he isn’t. “‘Joe Rogan’s giving out dangerous vaccine misinformation,’†he says, mimicking his detractors. “Fuck. Did I?†he asks. “I might’ve!†But at the same time, “if you’re getting vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?â€
It is. And Rogan seems to know it, because compared with other topics, he only briefly touches on the big anti-vaccine claims he has made endlessly over the past several years, framing them as jokes or open questions rather than hard-and-fast truths. He’s more comfortable going all in on gender, sexuality, and transphobia, and even though he perpetually reassures the audience that he’s actually pro-acceptance and -love, the bulk of his material is a deeply tiresome expression of “ick†masked as “Just asking questions.†Sure, he loves and supports trans people, but where are the lines? At what point is a trans woman allowed to use a women’s bathroom? Isn’t the pregnant-man emoji stupid? It used to be that when a man wanted to wear a dress, we just called him crazy — did we forget that people might just be crazy? It’s a series of undigested thoughts dressed up as meaningful insight, a pure conduit to the ideas floating around in Rogan’s head, expressed as though they’re original conceits or surprising perspectives on the world. He likes talking to Elon Musk, he says later in the special, but he knows Musk is never thinking the same thing he is. Smart people don’t have these kinds of stupid-brilliant revelations.
Rogan fans who watch Burn the Boats but ignore most other comedians might come away with the sense that Rogan is the only person talking about this stuff, but what’s most exhausting about the special is how repetitive and rehashed it all feels. Audiences looking for more transphobic comedy can easily find other comedians doing it with more verve and imagination; Dave Chappelle doesn’t do much else anymore, but he does still do this. Rogan’s “Alex Jones was right about a lot of things … He was wrong about one big thing†joke is a structure perfected and much better deployed by comedians like Bill Burr, who thrive in that place where the audience’s anticipated political stance balloons during the setup, then becomes the knifepoint pivot into a deflating punch line. Audiences looking for a more deft smackdown of a heckler yelling something about cobalt mines can find an endless supply of crowd-interaction clips on TikTok. People who want to hear a comedian defend saying bad words could check out Sam Jay, whose sincere ownership of that fantastically hacky premise is really impressive.
Nothing about the substance of Rogan’s Burn the Boats material differentiates itself from a bunch of other people doing it better. What he has instead is a sweaty, screamy sense of effort and a stage persona that’s brimming over with his need to say what’s in his head as loudly as possible. It’s not especially well timed or paced, and he has to barrel through more than one moment in which the San Antonio crowd seems poised to shout back at him in response (like when he insists Musk is smart and a man somewhere in the theater yells “No!â€). He rushes through his closer like a middle-schooler who just realized he hit the word count on his language-arts assignment, slamming through an underwritten joke about his horny grandpa and almost swallowing the final punch line.
There is one thing to be said for Burn the Boats: If we must do live specials, they may as well be for hours like this one. During the stream, the laughter sounded distant yet too aggressive at the same time, like a dial suddenly getting turned up every time Rogan hit a punch line. But Rogan’s comedy is not about the artistry of a well-constructed hour, nor is it interested in the way a dramaturge or an inspired director might be able to elevate his material with sharp visuals or sound design. It’s about saying things for an audience in a slightly more organized way than he would on a podcast. Like the Tom Brady roast, liveness is fully capable of capturing what Rogan wants to accomplish here: saying things you’re not supposed to say, being proud of how shocking it is, and feeling glee at being in the same room with other people who are also enjoying the sense of shock and naughtiness. And besides, why present material as a new meaningful piece of work when Rogan is essentially a bad-boy-comedian cover band, playing the old hits that everyone already knows? There’s no need for polish when the goal is outrage fodder past its expiration date.