Controversial Comedian’s New Netflix Special Will Win Over The Haters

Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats currently has a zero percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, and I can’t tell if it’s from being review-bombed by people who didn’t watch it, or if they did watch it and genuinely think it’s that terrible.

As somebody who couldn’t even be considered a causal fan of Joe Rogan in the sense that I’ve probably listened to 20 out of 2,430 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast (I’ll check it out for the occasional musician or comedian interview), I really don’t have any strong feelings about the guy. I know he had some hot (read: profoundly stupid) takes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he’s from the same graduating class as other comedians whose entire catalogs I celebrate, so why not give it a go?

Going into Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats with zero expectations, I wasn’t really surprised or taken aback by the brand of Gen-X humor that Rogan and his cohorts have been bellowing into microphones for the past 30 years. But what sets Rogan’s special apart from something that Bill Burr would put out is that he’s generated a palpable amount of bad PR over the last few years, which he wholly addresses in this Netflix special.

Most importantly, he acknowledges the negative press he got from making light of the pandemic that took so many lives. Extending an olive branch to his audience, he makes light of the fact that when he was diagnosed with COVID, how ironic and funny it would have been if he had actually succumbed to the illness and passed away after running his mouth. I’m paraphrasing because I’m not a comedian, but the takeaway is that in his final moments on his death-bed, he’d look around, shrug, and confirm that his death would have been kind of funny given the context.

He also caps off the bit by stating, “We lost a lot of people during COVID and most of ’em are still alive,” acknowledging how many friends he lost during his public fallout.

Not afraid to lean into his public image as a total dim-witted meathead, Joe Rogan also reminds everybody at the Burn the Boats taping that he was the host of Fear Factor for seven seasons, and that after taking a DNA test he found out that he’s actually 57 percent more Neanderthal than regular people. While this special can be seen as a form of damage control when he addresses his controversies, he continues to lean into the usual stand-up shtick about how men are different than women, and how he’d like to do recreational drugs with Prince Harry.

Addressing his use of racial slurs in the past, Joe Rogan tells his side of the story in a way that’s equal parts self-aware and self-deprecating. At first he backpedals by stating that when he would quote Richard Pryor bits on air, he would quote them verbatim to preserve the bit, problematic words and all. In the next breath, he mentions that when somebody compiles every time he’s done that over the past 15 years and uploads it to YouTube, it absolutely comes off as extremely racist, which has encouraged him to change his behavior.

I’m not here to do a deep dive on whether what Joe Rogan has said in the past was right or wrong, but as a fan of comedy, it’s hard to ignore the fact that he does an excellent job setting himself up and knocking himself down in Burn the Boats. Following the setup/punchline formula, his jokes are well-crafted, albeit low-brow, and in my honest opinion … pretty basic stuff.

GFR SCORE

Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats, in my opinion, is a solid mid-tier comedy special that is mostly harmless considering how many different ways the comedian could have leaned into his controversies. At the end of the day, Rogan comes off as somebody who is willing to look at himself with some introspection and make peace with the fact that there are some people out there who will always hate him no matter what he says or does. As somebody who’s wholly indifferent about Joe Rogan and his various misadventures, I probably wouldn’t watch the special again, but I’d definitely recommend his Netflix special to the people I know who are reliably into his brand of humor.