It can be hard to tell, these days, what some people mean by “comedy.” By the evidence of the work that comedians are doing, jokes may have dropped out of the definition. Like other performers in our Balkanized, make-your-own-prime-time-entertainment landscape, many comedians act less like artists or court jesters than like notionally humorous leaders of affinity groups or of minor, mostly harmless cults. They tend to say just what their viewers want to hear, but with the rhythm, if not the cathartic finality, of a joke.
This rather new phenomenon has to do with the fact that comedians are springing up from more corners of our media purview than ever. Increasingly, you don’t first become aware of them as comedians. One might be a podcaster you like, or make Instagram posts that show up on your “explore” page. Maybe another is a scene-stealing guest star on one of your favorite shows. Only later do you realize that they also happen to have a special on the way. There’s no Johnny Carson to introduce us to comics qua comics. They’ve got to sneak into your field of attention, often by way of some algorithmic back door, in order to grasp your affection.
Take Joe Rogan, for instance. He’s come to prominence—and to infamy—by way of his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a hotbed of dorm-room conversation that sometimes plays as a mildly endearing bull session but just as often takes a turn toward conspiracy thinking and florid misinformation, with a formlessly reactionary bent. Rogan is a longtime standup, but it’s hard to find somebody who knew him first for his jokes. He was a bit ahead of the curve in at least one way: he built a career by other means. For decades, he’s been a fixture as a commentator of U.F.C.’s mixed-martial-arts matches. Well before he started his podcast, he was the host of an equally enriching program, “Fear Factor.” You know, the one where desperate Americans do nasty shit—eat a spider, suck a goat’s udder or a leech—for a little bit of cash.
In his new Netflix special, “Burn the Boats,” Rogan tells a story about a “Fear Factor” challenge that was so much more deranged than usual (the highest bar!) that the network, NBC, decided not to air it. It involved donkeys and their . . . reproductive emissions. I’m sorry to report that bit of news, but Rogan is not. He luxuriates in the scenario, rhapsodizing about the stuff—buckets of it—not for any revelation but to milk his crowd for gross-out reactions, not laughs but groans. In the special—which aired live in early August, an experiment that Netflix started with Chris Rock’s successful post-slap routine, “Selective Outrage”—Rogan wears jeans and an untucked mustard-yellow button-up shirt: business casual for guys who work for themselves. He shouts a lot, his way of creating emphasis when the logical gist of a joke won’t do the trick.
He starts the special—shot at the Majestic Theatre in San Antonio and directed by Anthony Giordano—with some local patter about Texas, where he now lives. He’s moved his podcast operation there, and has opened a club, called Comedy Mothership, in Austin. Sounding annoyed, he notes that some media outlets have called it an “anti-woke” comedy club. “You mean . . . a comedy club?” he says, with an exasperated tone. It’s a clunky bit of group-reinforcing business, aimed directly at the erogenous zones of his fans. It’s not us who share some special ideology, he seems to be saying. We just like to laugh. Everybody used to be like this! It’s them—our detractors—who are weirdly fixated.
Indeed, a large part of Rogan’s ethos is this kind of misdirection about what constitutes an unthinking group. The sort of trans joke he tells is quite old now. Forget about being offensive—whatever happened to trying not to be a hack? This one is about the way that like-minded lemmings come together and create a latticework of ideas:
Rogan is very worried about pregnant men. I guess he thinks they’re “funny,” but he also, with his shouted incredulity, wants you to think, like he does, that the mere idea of them is a universally applicable symbol of sociopolitical mania. He’s got a joke about bathrooms, too. Heard that one? In this case, anyway, the joke is about how a complex understanding of gender and the self is incompatible, somehow, with the tenets of social democracy. If you disagree, you’re a dope, an unthinking weenie, and with your scolding you’re making life less fun for Rogan and his followers. Sorry, I mean fans. This is the function of Rogan’s type of work: to reverse reality, to make members of a faction feel like freethinkers. There’s a living in it.
Disoriented by my encounter with Rogan, I went looking for other specials, hopeful that they’d revive my enthusiasm for a form of entertainment that I go to for surprises, not for assurances of my own correctness. Matt Rife is a twenty-eight-year-old comic who was delivered to me by the inscrutable whims of Instagram. He started standup comedy at fifteen years old, and worked at small clubs for years. He’s known for clips he shares online of his crowd work—improvising by giving audience members a hard time—and for the increasingly combative stance he’s taken against “snowflakes.”
You wouldn’t know that last bit from watching his latest Netflix special, “Lucid,” directed by Erik Griffin. All we see is Rife’s interaction with an audience of modest size, loosely organized around the theme of dreams. He asks soft questions about people’s aspirations. “What’s your dream that came true?” he inquires moonily. Rife has a dudey energy and looks like a member of a forgotten boy band—he often seems to be flirting, his way of showing that he’s interested in people’s stories. He’s not really trying to crack you up. Either you’re with him already—I wasn’t—or you’ll struggle to figure out the point of his act.
Speaking of dreams, the comedian Langston Kerman—you may have seen him on HBO’s “Insecure,” or on the brilliant satire “South Side,” for which he was a writer as well as a performer—once wanted to be a poet. In his exciting new Netflix special, a saving grace, called “Bad Poetry,” directed by the comedian John Mulaney, he talks about how he lost that aspiration. “I was gonna write silky metaphors,” he says mournfully. But he made the mistake of sharing his fledgling work with some high-school kids he taught. One girl shot his poetry down, and the dream wasn’t just deferred—it was dead.
What’s interesting about Kerman is that he isn’t a persona. All we really learn about him from the special is that he’s married, that he and his wife are both biracial—the “same mix,” he says: white dad, Black mom—and that they recently had a child. You’ll earn his enmity if you don’t coo over the photos he shares. But he’s not out to build a set of tenets or attitudes to which you can hitch your wagon. His style of comedy refreshingly repels that kind of watching. He’s all about jokes that start out absurd and get crazier as they proceed. The bit about mean schoolkids ends up being a way to justify a story about a teacher who fed a puppy to a snapping turtle in front of his class. Kerman once saw Forest Whitaker try to use the bathroom at IHOP—the “International House,” he says grandly—without being a customer. No dice. He imagines an uptight race man, perhaps a member of the Nation of Islam, who makes an exception for Kerman’s white dad. The stuff’s just zany. Remember fun?
We think of this kind of comedy—zing, zing, zing, with little breath between—as old-fashioned, something we left back on the Catskills circuit, where it belongs. But, in an age where so many people on our screens have some irritating point to prove, maybe work like Kerman’s is the way back to comedy on its own terms, as an art to be enjoyed in its purest form. Get up there and tell some jokes. I don’t want to join a club. ♦