Six years have passed since Joe Rogan’s last Netflix special. And what a six years they’ve been.
Since 2018, the podcasting magnate moved to Texas to escape the terror of progressive California, downplayed the severity of COVID-19, spent the height of the pandemic performing stand-up shows that doubled as super-spreader events, fearmongered about trans people and immigrants, promoted figures like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Chris Rufo, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., transformed the Austin comedy scene into a safe space for reactionary artists, and inked two nine-figure deals with Spotify.
When Joe Rogan took the stage on Saturday for his live special Burn the Boats, he did so as one of the richest and most influential men in American media.
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Rogan is comedy’s kingmaker, as Bloomberg described him in a recent feature, with the power to turbocharge careers by hosting comedians on his podcast or giving them plum spots at his Austin club, the Comedy Mothership. He is also comedy’s king, possessed of a seemingly divine power to do whatever he wants and suffer no consequences.
Rogan emerged unscathed from the 2022 artist-led boycott of Spotify over his propensity for spreading medical misinformation; rock star Neil Young, who pulled his music from the platform in protest, returned earlier this year. Rogan’s longstanding disgust toward trans people, whom he and Tucker Carlson recently described as a Satanic evil, has diminished neither his viewership numbers nor his standing among comedians.
He may have apologized for his past use of the n-word, but he continues lifting up comedians who traffic in bigotry to this very day—comedians like Shane Gillis, who used slurs for trans, gay, and disabled people during a recording of the podcast Kill Tony at Rogan’s club last month, and like that podcast’s host, Tony Hinchcliffe, who went viral for using an anti-Asian slur against his own opener in 2021.
Just this week, Rogan begrudgingly lamented the reality that “the worst vice president,” Kamala Harris, has a decent shot at beating his preferred candidate (at least in 2020) Donald Trump.
In a sense, Rogan and Netflix have had much the same journey. The streamer spent the last decade cornering the market for stand-up comedy, releasing as many as 50 specials per year at the height of its expansion. It became a kingmaker in its own right, shaping the art form both by putting young talent on the map and by building out comedy’s upper class: the small but growing cadre of artists with enough pull to sell out massive venues, netting millions or tens of millions in a single tour.
Like Rogan, Netflix has weathered its own share of controversies, including an employee walkout sparked by Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans material in The Closer.
Netflix has cut back on its stand-up programming over the last few years, shifting its focus to splashy events like the Netflix Is A Joke festival and live specials, including Rogan’s on Saturday night at 10 p.m. ET. (The first, Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage in 2023, was a ratings smash if not exactly a critical success.)
Despite its supposedly omnivorous interest in comedy styles, the streamer clearly recognizes the enormous potential in Rogan’s kingdom. Some might call the comedians in his orbit transgressive or edgy; they might call themselves anti-woke. These are all euphemisms for what they actually are, which is right-wing.
Almost across the board, comedians in this milieu are obsessed with trans people, often using the usual slur to express their disgust with the community and its onerous, incessant, unyielding demands for basic rights and dignity. Many of these comics have a penchant for mocking Asian people; some are fed up with the immigrants they think are gobbling up our public resources; nearly all of them harbor a deep disdain for women. They use their platforms to host conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, far-right ideologues like Tucker Carlson, public health threats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and violent misogynists like Andrew Tate, exposing their audiences to a steady torrent of extremist thought.
They are also immensely lucrative investments. Comedians by night and propagandists by day, they just happen to be the industry’s most bankable talents—in no small part thanks to Joe Rogan.
Consider Tim Dillon. A podcaster and Joe Rogan Experience regular, Dillon has devoted considerable airtime to railing against immigration, going so far as to embrace the white nationalist great replacement theory in a JRE appearance last year. In other segments, he has questioned whether America can really “absorb” any more people, argued against gender-affirming care for trans youth, and complained about trans athletes. A longtime fan of Alex Jones, Dillon has hosted the disgraced Sandy Hook truther on multiple episodes, including a 2020 New Year’s Eve live-stream where Jones raved about election fraud and promoted the upcoming rally he helped organize in Washington, D.C. (Yes, the one you’re thinking of.) In addition to all of this, he is an incredibly popular comedian. Netflix released his last hour in 2022 and just announced his next one, a “talk-show style special” out this fall.
Then there’s Tom Segura. A 43-time JRE guest, Segura and his wife Christina Pazsitzky followed Rogan to Austin early in the pandemic. He was an established comedian by that point, with a robust touring career and several Netflix specials under his belt. (His most recent, Sledgehammer, came out last year.) In recent years, he and Pazsitzky have gone completely down the right-wing rabbit hole. They regularly use their podcast Your Mom’s House and appearances on other podcasts to mock trans people, at times delighting in vicious commentary about pronouns, non-conforming identities, and (what they see as) cringey videos about trans topics they find online. The couple also has a distinct misogynist streak, perhaps illustrated best by their fawning conversation with “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate in 2021, a year before his arrest on charges of human trafficking and rape. When Deadline asked Segura about him last year, Segura said he wasn’t following the story.
And what of Shane Gillis, the comedian whose long history of racist, homophobic, and transphobic material led to his 2019 firing from Saturday Night Live days after he was hired? Thanks in part to Rogan’s support, he’s now a mainstream success, appearing regularly at the Comedy Mothership and on JRE. His Netflix special Beautiful Dogs netted more than 12 million views, according to the streamer, with his series Tires earning 3.8 million views in its first weekend on the platform—and a renewal before it even premiered. Gillis, who never stopped peddling bigoted material along the way, has used his own popular podcast Rogan-style to help build up fan bases for the podcasters behind War Mode, a pair of Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook truthers, and the comedians Sam Hyde and Nick Rochefort, whose short-lived Adult Swim show Million Dollar Extreme was canceled in 2016 amidst controversy over their white supremacist affiliations.
One might look at all these comedians, who make straightforwardly bigoted comedy for audiences who eat it up, and wonder if Netflix is making the same move as SNL when it hired Gillis: a deliberate investment in right-wing comedy for right-wing audiences. Or one might look out at the broader landscape they inhabit and make a simpler conclusion: that this is just what comedy is now, in large part because of Joe Rogan, Spotify, Dave Chappelle, and Netflix.
It’s a simple proposition. Over the last decade, Spotify paid Rogan upwards of $500 million. Netflix, meanwhile, paid Chappelle at least $140 million for his seven specials with the streamer.
It’s hardly mysterious that this period saw the proliferation of comedians with their same styles and politics, most notably their transphobia; it’s simple cause-and-effect. If you give a lot of money to artists of a particular sensibility—and if both those artists have the power to elevate like-minded artists—that sensibility will quickly become the norm, especially if they get an assist from an industry-reshaping pandemic.
Looking back, we can see that Rogan did for comedy more or less what his friend Elon Musk did to Twitter. He used his money and power to create a space for a certain set of viewpoints. People with those viewpoints swiftly rushed to fill it, and now they’re everywhere. They’re the norm. They run the place. However Burn the Boats fares this weekend, the truth is Rogan’s already won. The industry belongs to him.
