I like Joe Rogan's podcasts, though I skip ahead in 5 minute jumps when he starts talking about drugs or aliens, and I skip whole episodes if it's about martial arts. But I've never been able to watch more than a minute or 2 of his standup, and I didn't watch his new standup when it aired live the other day.
So I'm interested in Zinoman's opinions:
Whereas he performs patient thoughtfulness in his podcasts, his standup is frantic, animated, full of unmodulated yelling.... His jokes rely on the most well-worn of stand-up subjects. Pat-downs at the airport. The comedy of old people having sex. Describing a drug trip, man. When it comes to sex, men (have you heard?) are different than women. The variation with Rogan is an additional sentence mocking the straw man of those who think the differences are purely cultural.
His joke constructions are also familiar — the things you think but don’t do, the words you can’t say. His leans into stereotypes that have cracked up drunken club crowds for generations. When he discovers from a genetic test that he has some African ancestry, you just know a joke about penis size is on its way....
He says he believes in Pizzagate. He compares gay men to mountain lions (“I am glad they exist, but I don’t want to be surrounded by them”) and says slurs for cheap laughs....
While his stand-up here is cliché, his podcast is not. It’s less dogmatic or more paradoxical than his fiercest critics allow.... Rogan is interested in ideas on his podcast, whereas in his new special, he prefers playing dumb.....
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In an era of ideologues, Rogan thrives.
Seems like his stand up is more old school. But old school is effective in the That’s Not Funny Era
The variation with Rogan is an additional sentence mocking the straw man of those who think the differences are purely cultural
Strawman! No THAT is comedy gold.
I would largely agree with the commentary above although not as harshly. I appreciate Rogan's non-PC humor though I think the jokes themselves aren't that funny. As a comedian, I find Joe Rogan to be mid-tier. He is nowhere near as good as Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle. As a podcaster, Rogan is top-tier with the same caveats regarding drugs, aliens and MMA.
I doubt it because most standup comedians aren't very good at standup comedy any more.
I think a better question would be; "Is Jason Zinoman good at criticism?"
It’s hard to be a stand up after Richard Pryor. The genre is pretty stale.
Let's see Lex Friedman do a tight five.
no he isn't, he was the mechanic on news radio, before he ended up on fear factor
From the bits I have seen, Rogan isn't a good standup comedian.
I don't find him very funny, but I do enjoy his podcast stuff.
I also don't find Jerry Seinfeld very funny, but Seinfeld was great. My favorite stand-up right now is Nate Bergatze, and his podcast Nateland is also great.
I agree with the comments re Joe Rogan's podcast. I skip the MMA episodes. The episodes with comedians are OK because they are funny and quick-witted, but iterations on who played where mean little to me. I very much like JR's curiosity and, IMO, ability to change topics when the discussion is beginning to drag.
Rogan's is one of many 10-minute-at-a-time comedy specials.
Tig Nataro worth watching for epitome of terribleness. So bad, it's good. Audience loves her, so she must be well known for something.
Standup comedy is a matter of taste. To say someone is "good" at standup comedy falls into several objective/subjective measures:
1. Do you find it funny?
2. Does the comedian have a large fan base and/or make money?
3. 20 years from now, will anyone remember his act?
I watched one of Rogan's comedy specials. It was not doing it for me, but the audience appeared to be enjoying themselves.
All that criticism can be made about other comedians, especially those hosting late nite talk shows.
One laughs or one doesn't.
Talking about jokes being bad because they're on "the wrong subjects" or done"In the wrong way" is just leftwing Bullshit.
Schopenhauer thought that playing dumb was often the smart move, and he ain't wrong.
I look in on The JRE once in a while, but much more for his interesting guests than for him.
As a straight male I'm here to tell you that being surrounded by gay men in the workplace is way better by orders of magnitude than being surrounded by butch lesbians who do not like men - straight, gay or otherwise. And if you do work in a company or a dept headed by a butch lesbian you won't be there for long. You'll be fired or convinced to quit for some made up excuse or accusation. That way they can hire another butch lesbian to take your place.
Rogan manages to make his guests look good. Well, as good as they can.
If you think Tina Fey is good at standup comedy you probably don’t like Joe Rogan.
For Joe Rogan to be funny he would have to court controversy. He wasn’t funny when he had nothing to protect, he’s definitely not about to start now.
I liked Tina Fey in "Admissions." A comedy of the Rom variety, but she didn't as an actor hate men at least. I have her in six others too but don't remember the plots, probably because of the plot difficulty being too contrived.
I have no SNL experience.
I haven't found any Rogan that seems worth listening to of any genre.
Late Night Talk Shows should have retired when Carson did.
YouTube keeps pushing Debussy's Quartet in G minor on me, so I hear various groups, for instance one now. The perfection required for that performance has to be compared to what's expected in podcasts. It's not even close.
Some authors strike me as that close (Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein, Coleridge) and some in a niche sort of way (Vicki Hearne).
I think it's a question of art or not.
Here's some of his stand-up, so you can judge for yourself.
I think he's funny as shit!
Rogan's podcasts sometimes have excellent guests, whose contributions are made possible by Rogan's prep work, and his knack for listening well, and then deftly advancing the conversation.
The Netflix standup, despite a few funny bits, was disappointing. He went out of his way to emphasize his claim that he is a libertarian leftist. Sounded to me like an RFK voter, which is to say, confused, gullible, and a bit desperate. The stuff about drugs, and his relationship with his wife, was unfunny.
He's a lot more popular and successful than you or me, so take my criticism with a grain of salt.
All those clips are from a show he did in Colorado 10 years ago. Here's the full hour:
Rocky Mountain High
Nobody at the NYT could beat Joe Rogan in MMA fight. Nobody at the NYT could get more laughs on a stand-up stage.
That's fine.
Here's the question you should be asking.
Why is Joe Rogan better at journalism than you are?
While his stand-up here is cliché, his podcast is not. It’s less dogmatic or more paradoxical than his fiercest critics allow.... Rogan is interested in ideas on his podcast...
Why is the NYT so predictable, brain-dead, and boring? You'd think the drug-happy wrestler would suck at high-end intelligent conversations. How did he seize your audience?
Well he has gabbard on 6 times and then voted for commissar bernie
Stand-up comedy hasn't been worth much since Robin Williams absolutely manic young live shows where his brain ran 3x faster than the average person's brain. Or 10x faster. Stand-up has been a tedious formula for decades, and is a lot more about the social interaction and attitudes shared between the performer and the audience than the content or "jokes" per se.
I don't like Joe Rogan's comedy.
I don't like Joe Rogan's martial arts content.
I do like that he (often) lets anyone speak their mind for hours on end.
I love that his November 28, 2016 guest Jordan Peterson (episode #877) made Peterson a star and revealed the inanity of nascent the Woke religion.
https://www.jrepodcast.com/guest/jordan-peterson/
Standup comedian has an act - breaking news.
Joe Rogan wears his feelings on his sleeve, and I think that disconcerts people who can't see past his giant meatball head. He also fiercely defends women and admires woman athletes.
On the comedy series "This is Not Happening," he tells this honest, grotesque, heartfelt story about a prostitute -- one of the saddest, funniest, most tragic stories I've ever heard, and you couldn't drag me to a comedy club.
His interview with Jordan Peterson is amazing, and forget even the political stuff. When he talks about his parents' divorce, and when he talks about how proud he was of the Fear Factor contestants who really were scared but tried so hard -- you see the measure of the man.
Rogan humanizes the overlooked, the addicted, the poor, the fuck-ups, with a sensitivity few possess. And his deep knowledge of extreme sports, oddly enough, led him to becoming a pretty unique expert on the developmental, hormonal, and kinesiological implications of allowing males to wrestle, race, and fight women.
He also hosts some pretty non-insane doctors and archologists. I've learned more useful and mundane facts about female life cycles from his female physician guests like Rhonda Patrick. And his "fringe" archeologists who predicted earlier civilizations have been entirely vindicated -- grudgingly, by academia -- in the last decade.
Yeah, the psychedelic stuff is dull and stupid. Ditto pot. So skip it. Larry King sold himself to the commies at RT; Barbara Walters started the trans child mutilation craze (and The View), and we all know what happened to Charlie Rose.
Some of his stuff is funny. Full time pro comic Kat Willaiam, Brad Williams or Norm McDonald(rip) funny? No. But he's a great interviewer.
"I think a better question would be; 'Is Jason Zinoman good at criticism?'"
Back when NYT hired JZ, we told our readers "Be careful what you wish for." Standup has never had dedicated critics. The SF Chronicle had one... or was it the Examiner?
No good can come of it. Our colleagues thought, "Oh, boy! One positive JZ nod un the NYT and I'm a superstar!"
We said, nah, critics suck and artists bend and shape their art to curry favor with them. It warps the art and the craft. Years later JZ did a podcast where he sorta revealed that he's still peeved that we were less than enthusiastic about his hiring.
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