Joe Rogan in his new Netflix special, ‘Burn the Boats.’ Photo: Troy Conrad/Netflix
Reviews are in for Joe Rogan’s new comedy special and the consensus seems to be that the controversial podcaster’s “jokes” about the LGBTQ+ community were too tiresome and predictable to even warrant much outrage.
In Burn the Boats, which streamed live from the Majestic Theater in Austin, Texas, Saturday night on Netflix, Rogan spewed his standard conspiracy theories while attempting to evade responsibility for the misinformation he puts out to his legions of mostly white, mostly male fans by suggesting that no one should take his uninformed ramblings seriously in the first place.
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“If you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?” Rogan said at one point while addressing the anti-vaccine misinformation he’s helped spread.
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He also whined about not being able to use certain slurs anymore and suggested that transgender people are “crazy” and “perverted.”
“I believe in trans people because I think the world is strange and nature is strange, and I think nature can throw you a curveball and you believe you’re in the wrong body, and I fully support your right as an adult to do whatever you want that makes you happy,” Rogan said at one point, his patronizing, overly simplistic understanding of the trans experience on full display. “I believe in freedom, and I believe in love… But I also believe in crazy people.”
“I just want to know what happened,” he continued. “It’s almost like a pervert wizard waved a magic spell on the whole world. ‘With a wave of this wand, you can walk into the women’s locker room with a hard c**k, and anybody who complains is a Nazi. Abracadabra!’ And it just works! And everyone just accepts this new reality, and it’s f**king weird. I just think we need standards. You can’t just put lipstick on and now you can s**t in the women’s room!”
At another point he insisted that he is not homophobic. “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**k dudes. I don’t like my chances, OK? They’re not unicorns—they’re just men who f**k men. And every man who’s ever lived is a shifty c*m salesman, OK? 100 percent. Especially the ones who say they’re not.”
Elsewhere in the special, Rogan joked that he wished he was gay so he could continue to use homophobic slurs with impunity. Which he did anyway, using the word “fa***t,” to thunderous applause from his audience.
Critics have been supremely unimpressed with the special, with Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk describing Rogan’s approach to cultural commentary as “obnoxious” and Burn the Boats as “an underwhelming, exhausting, and lazily derivative hour of stand-up.”
“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,” VanArendonk wrote, adding that “Rogan is essentially a bad-boy-comedian cover band, playing the old hits that everyone already knows.”
In his review, The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman criticized Rogan’s use of slurs to get “cheap laughs.” Rogan, Zinoman wrote, “leans into stereotypes that have cracked up drunken club crowds for generations” and described his stand-up as “cliché.”
At one point in Burn the Boats, Rogan joked that he won’t use the N-word, but is more than happy to use another insensitive term to refer to people with developmental disabilities because he’s “more afraid of Black people than I am of r****ds.”
“Duh!” he added. “Don’t you know how jokes work, f****t? It’s all just supposed to be funsies!”
In a Substack post, comedian Michael Ian Black ripped the joke to shreds. “We get it, Joe. White dudes want to be able to make fun of trans people and Black people and Asians and whoever they set their little eyes upon – not because they have a point to make – but because Mommy told them no and it makes them sad,” Black wrote.
Black speculated that Rogan’s rebellion against “political correctness” has to do with “the idiotic notion that empathy is women’s work. Therefore, to rebel against kindness is to assert one’s masculinity.”
“Rogan could use the opportunity to deconstruct the impotency of bigotry, and the power of language to harm others,” Black wrote. “If Rogan had taken his joke the next step and used it to explore his own internalized racism and homophobia, that might have been interesting. It might have been good.”
“Burn the Boats isn’t cutting-edge art,” MSNBC columnist Jacques Berlinerblau wrote. “It’s not disruptive like the interventions of Jerrod Carmichael, or Hannah Gadsby, or Bo Burhham. Rather, Rogan’s humor caresses a mass constituency, a ginormous ‘we.’ If his jokes reflect the sensitivities and anxieties of a huge swath of American men, then that’s a gloomy prophecy.”
Comedians and professional critics weren’t the only ones unimpressed with Burn the Boats. As Buzzfeed noted, on Sunday X was full of withering criticism of Rogan’s special from viewers.
“Joe Rogan proving he was right to say he ‘can’t tell jokes anymore’ just not in the way he meant,” one user wrote.
“I mean at least be funny if you’re being ignorant and offensive,” another commented. “Joe Rogan’s main crime during his comedy special was he wasn’t funny.”
A common refrain from commenters on clips posted by the @NetflixIsAJoke account: “Where’s the joke?”
I mean at least be funny if you’re being ignorant and offensive. Joe Rogan’s main crime during his comedy special was he wasn’t funny. His cult loves it so it doesn’t matter but he’s making too many smart people stupid. https://t.co/vxOX04Qigp
