February 13, 2023
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Mike Binder
A few weeks back I wrote a list of, in my opinion, the top ten comics who are making an impact on culture. On my list was Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, Chris Rock, Whitney Cummings, Bill Maher, Kevin Hart, Taylor Tomlinson, and Louis C.K.
The last spot I left open because as I said, it was someone who is maybe the single most influential on culture and politics today. For this reason alone, I surmised they deserved a separate column, and I was wrong. It’s going to take two.
JOE ROGAN- PART ONE
Joe Rogan is hands down the most important Stand-up today in terms of his work affecting how this country and his listeners feel about their lives and our world.
There are a few reasons for this, but the first is that no one trusts anyone anymore—especially not politicians and journalists. There’s no doubt that most politicians have lost the pitch these days and the media won’t expose this fact. Just the opposite, they’re every bit as inept. When it comes to today’s ‘journalists,’ to quote the great Prof. Irwin Corey. ‘Deep, deep, deep, down, they’re incredibly shallow.’
Celebrities, too for the most part have driven their credibility off of the side of the road. When the triple hyphenates you crave went from Actor-writer-producer to Actor-writer-activist, show business had officially closed down and re-opened as another run-of-the-mill clown shop. Sports stars don’t fare much better. Selling their souls and their soles to China and the corporations that China bought to get to them. Flying private planes around the planet telling us what not to drive, say, read, look at, or think about, while they paint giant BLM banners on the floors of their games as if it was garlic on their door late at night to ward off the werewolves.
Does anyone feel a damn thing real coming from modern art right now? There’s a Jeff Koons factory in every city. Same millionaire/billionaire mansion filling bait and tackle shop in every major town, different phony mass-produced ‘artist’. No one has a shred of organic rhyme or rhythm to their work anymore. Everyone on every pedestal is only giving off loud shrill feedback and we’re all covering our ears. We truly have come to a point where the most reliabe flow of authentic voices we hear are from Stand-up comics.
Joe Rogan is infuriating to so many people because of his authenticity. Yes, there could be a dozen things not to like about Joe Rogan at any given time. None of them, though, overshadow the one thing that you can’t help but admire; He’s desperately trying to ferret out the truth.
Try and think back to when you were a kid in the family kitchen, or yard with your siblings and your parents, to a time when you were putting your whole body into shutting someone up, from stopping them from spitting something out that you didn’t want the room to know? Think about how hard you tried to shut that sister, brother, neighbor, or cousin up? How important it was to you? Now try and remember if they were about to blurt out the truth, or just some careless made-up story?
I’ll bet good money (Not U.S. Dollars) it was the truth. Even back then, you knew a lie wasn’t worth a lot of effort because it would eventually be shown to be nothing but fluff. You wouldn’t have wasted the huffing and the puffing. It was the truth that scared the bejesus out of you.
Now try to think how hard the mainstream media and the far left are trying to shut people like Joe Rogan up? Do you think it’s because they’re worried he’s going to be telling you fairy tales you’ll just swallow then hop somewhere into a river of sharks? Dive off of a cliff into a canyon because of something you heard on JRE? Hell no. They’re petrified Joe and all of his Stand-up potty-mouthed podcast pals are going to feed you the straight-up truth on about a half dozen issues that the big league reporters have looked the other way or bought another line.
The Joe Rogan Experience is basically always about a comedian looking for an answer to something. Often with a gaggle of funny friends, a lot of weed, cigars, liquor and jokes. How could the zeitgeist of the moment not want to kill it? It’s way too much fun, way too retro, and definitely too much testosterone.
The question though isn’t why doesn’t anyone want the same answers?
The question is how did we get to the point that everyone is so damn afraid? This is America?
It took a Stand-up comic to get Covid and take Ivermectin and live through all the ridicule of the pharmaceutical companies’ press corps, and the Biden administration. Put up with them publicly rapping his knuckles with PR fed Horse Paste jokes and moron memes to finally shed some light on it all.
(*Which of the above looks closer to death? The emaciated older rich lady in the wig on the left, or the guy on the right that just built the log cabin in the yard for the kids, then skinned a couple of cows?)
The point is it took Rogan, along with some serious Dr.’s like Robert Morton and Naomi Wolf, and the author Bobby Kennedy, Jr. to force our establishment to get serious about treatments that work alongside of the important vaccines.
Don’t kid yourself. A comedian did that. Saved a lot of lives. While the rest of the media and the ideology drunkards like Howard Stern who are still to this day making Trump-told everyone-to-swallow -bleach jokes, not as jokes, Joe Rogan and his gang of misfit podcasters were begging us to think for ourselves. They opened our ears even though Youtube or someone else yanked them down every time the discussions pried them open.
Thanks to Rogan, then Bobby Kennedy, Jr, and Dr. Wolf, people now think about protocols and treatments the minute they get Covid. We don’t only think of ‘rubbers’ and ‘the pill’ when the term prophylactic comes to mind.
We can get Ivermectin and Hydrochlorquin from pharmacies now, and, yes, in early stages they do work great, and yes again, I did learn this thanks to Joe Rogan, who, no, is not a doctor, thank you very little, neither are half the people you’re tripping over to put your life’s hands into. (?) Back to Joe; Think what you want about him, and full disclosure, I’ve had some personal skirmishes with him myself, but I happen to respect the hell out of the guy’s work. As far as you, in your heart, you damn well knew he was too smart to take ‘horse paste’. You grabbed the talking points and went along with it, even though you knew he was too well-read, too rich, and too connected. Had access to the good doctors.
You and I just let them bully us. He didn’t. That’s why he fills arenas and has millions of downloads and we don’t. When he was doing interviews that weren’t Stand-up, you knew he was scraping for answers. For a kernel. ‘Why does this thing fly.?’ Digging. Pestering. ‘How many of us would be left if one of these exploded?’ Everyone else was too scared to do those type of shows. ‘Hey, listen to this, Dr. Morton here, he says the government is full of it. Let’s hear him out. Worse comes to worse, if he’s a deadbeat, Ari Shaffir and I’ll roast the hell out of him.’
Why else would people like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Rock get browbeat into jumping up and down shutting some podcast-comic up from yelling in the kitchen? He was telling the truth! We’ve been getting lied to a lot these last few years, and the old rock stars and has-been radio hacks that have sold their catalogs and consciences are pissed off that no one finds them colorable anymore, so they’re easily lit up by the younger media -twitter-wads that tell them to jump, and they, of course, ask, ‘How high?’
If you ever want to know the right side of any issue to be on going forward? Find out where, Cher, Bette Midler, Barbara Streisand, Howard Stern, and Neil Young are on it, then pick the other side. Find out where Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Whitney Cummings, Bill Burr, Adam Corolla, Dave Chapelle, Chris Rock, Earthquake, Yannis Pappis, and about ten other comics are cracking wise on the subject, and deep in that pile of comedy dung is your next little diamond of fact.
Stand-ups, who have to do that, Stand-up, face an audience, and be real, are the true north of entertainment and free speech in this era. I’m sorry. Bob Dylan isn’t going to get you anywhere near honesty today. The only thing blowing in the wind is his buddy Neil’s hot air.
No. It’s the comics. Rogan and his horde. Chappelle and his. Chris Rock. Bill Burr and his gaggle of working men Stand-ups. The new class coming up. Shane Gillis. Dan Soder. Big Jay Oakerson. Women too. Michelle Wolf, Jessica Kirson, Yamenkia Saunders, Eleanor Kerrigan. Each doing material that they’re ‘really not supposed to be doing.’ All products of a new world that Rogan, Burr, Maron, and Brian Redban kick-started back in the 2009 era.
When my friend Bobby Kennedy, Jr. wrote a brilliant book loaded down with the truth about the whole Covid story, called The Real Anthony Fauci, I tweeted, emailed and called out to ask everyone I knew to have him on their platforms. No one answered. Only Whitney Cummings and Bert Kreisher. Two comics. *Rogan was taking a pummeling at that moment over his Dr. Morton interview. The journalists were all calling up his old laundry mats in Boston from thirty years ago to see if by chance he left any old underwear lying around. Anything other than actually reading the book and looking into some of the claims as a real reporter might do.
So Stand-ups and a few others are what we have right now in terms of any blunt instruments of veracity. Do you know why? They don’t have an agenda other than being funny. The funniest stuff just happens to be the most real, that or the stuff you’re not supposed to say yet we all think. Some comics still get away with hiding behind the same old jokes, same old persona. Night after night, silly one-liners and puns. Or even comic spins on race relations and how horrible America, is with clever punchlines. The audience is going to be done with that though. Real soon. They want something that smells like it’s giving something up, tilling new soil. Comics can’t afford to put on much of a mask nowadays, (especially when we know the only thing it’s truly good for is so we don’t have to worry about bad breath.)
When everyone else in power has lost their trust, maybe even purposely made them all good and stupid, the audience will give you the gold ring if they know you’re going to push for them to get smarter while they’re laughing. The good ones like Rogan, Burr, Chappelle, Rock, Gervais, Cummings, etc.. know the only thing that works consistently is finding the humor in our absurd world, and in these times, if you’re a really honest Stand-up, trying not to get taken out for doing so.
COMING NEXT; JOE ROGAN – PART TWO
The new world of Stand-up he’s unleashed.