Austinist Interviews Joe Rogan

Was there any desire to end the show after Phil Hartman died?

We didn’t know how to proceed. A lot of people thought that we didn’t want her—it was such an awful thing to do and it was such a horrible way to die, the whole way it happened where she shot him in his sleep—it was so evil that we didn’t want her to take away the show, too.

Phil was really good friends with Jon Lovitz, and Jon had been on the show before. The idea came up of having Lovitz replace Phil. You know, I think in one way, I enjoyed working with Lovitz and I think the last season was just as funny as the other seasons. But it just wasn’t the same without Phil.

The first episode we did after his death, where we had to cover the fact that he died on the show—oh my God, it was so hard to do, dude. Everybody was crying. We were crying while we were filming it, we were crying while we were rehearsing it. It was just really hard; everybody loved that guy.

In that sense, I think that should have probably been the last episode. It really should have been that we just sent him off and said good-bye. Because it just wasn’t the same show. It was still really funny after Phil died, but it wasn’t the same. It was missing something.

I did like the last season.

It wasn’t that. It’s like beef stew, and then someone decided to take out the carrots. You can still eat it, but the carrots are supposed to be there. Without Phil it just felt weird. But Jon Lovitz is hilarious. He’s a great guy.

How did you manage to move from doing comedy for TV into Fear Factor?

Fear Factor was just something that they offered me. I talk about it in my act—I thought it was a goof. I thought it was going to last a few episodes and then it would get yanked off the air. It seemed ridiculous.

The first order—I don’t know if we did 9 or 13 or something like that, but I was like, “There’s no way we’re gonna keep doing this. This is ridiculous.”

They were making people eat eyeballs and bugs and chasing dogs after them. I really didn’t believe it. And I was in the middle of trying to develop a sitcom, and while I was in the middle of it this came up. It was good money and I thought it would be kind of funny. Worse case scenario I thought it would give me some material for my act. The fucking thing just never ended; it went on for six years.

Many more people know me from Fear Factor than they do from being a stand-up comedian. And on Fear Factor, there was never really any opportunity to be funny. I mean, every now and then I would say a little funny comment or something like that or make a snide remark, but my primary function on that show was to keep the contestants competing against each other. It wasn’t to be funny.

It’s like here, the thing that I do best—which is stand-up comedy—is the thing that I’m known for the least. It’s a very odd little position to be in.

How do you feel about that?

It’s all good, man. I’ve been very fortunate my whole life. I’m enjoying just doing comedy, period. I would enjoy comedy if there were 20 people in the room. It’s a fun art form.

It’s a crazy way to communicate. You write things and you do it in a form that makes people laugh. And when you make people laugh, you literally make them feel better. It’s a very bizarre art form; it’s an art form that actually changes people’s state of mind. And when you’re doing it, it’s like it’s alive. The more you go over it and the more you expand your own ideas and your own philosophies, your comedy gets into weirder and weirder places. It’s like it has a life of its own—and you have to constantly feed it.

It’s a fucking fun thing to do. My favorite thing to do is stand-up. It’s so rewarding, man.

Photo by neonlike on flickr

Is that why you’re so passionate in having come out against Carlos Mencia and Dane Cook? It seems like you have a very strong connection with comedy, not simply as a thing to do on a Friday night but as a means of relating to an audience and making them feel better about themselves.

Comedy is an art form, and I think there are a lot of people that victimize that art form.

The only thing I said about Dane Cook—I compared some shit that was online and said he had a problem with taking other people’s material. But Dane Cook provided way more positive energy to the comedy community because Dane Cook showed everybody that you can market yourself and be enormously successful. That opened people’s eyes—he’s very important. His role in stand-up comedy is very important. But yeah, it’s pretty obvious that he did some unethical things.

Or, at the least—at the very least, he’s got a problem with remembering where he came up with bits. Which is possible. But that’s not possible with Mencia. He is just a complete and total thief.

Guys like that are very dangerous to the art form. Coming up with material is very difficult. You have to be thinking in a certain way; you have to be free. You have to be able to look at things and find what’s funny in them. You’ve got to work at that—you write something down and tweak the bit. You say it in a certain way, and then you try to be more economical with your use of words to get to the point quicker. You construct it—the thing that you’re making is a vehicle for the laughter. You have to figure out how to get the thought to the audience in the funniest way possible.

Some people spend years working on pieces of material. And then finally they get it to a place where it’s really funny—where people are really laughing—and someone comes along and just repeats what they said. That’s a terrible thing.

And the fact that these club owners that make their living off of comedians and make their living off of art—the fact that they would allow someone who does that to work for them, that’s just sad. And no one was doing anything about it. I don’t like conflict; I don’t want to start a bunch of shit. I would way rather concentrate on positive things in my life. But every now and then there’s something that comes up where you go, “Fuck, man, someone’s gotta do something here. This is a real problem.” And that was one of those times.

I want to talk about your website—you have a very active forum on your website.

It’s an interesting little place—a weird little science project. I actually have two forums. I used to ban people a lot—someone came up with this rule that you have to post porn within your first 10 posts or you’d be kicked off the forums. I have no idea who came up with it or why, but I let them implement it. The idea was that if you can’t handle internet porn—you can’t handle looking at naked bodies or people having sex, you’d be too uptight for this forum.

So we did that for a while, but I thought that there had to be a better way to weed out people that were too uptight or a pain in the ass. Because it wasn’t just uptight, it was dumb. So what we came up with was a special ed forum. It’s a weird little dynamic; it’s like a civilization of its own.

But there are a lot of really interesting, intelligent people that post on there. A lot of really cool science threads and science debates. Right now there’s this big thread on a documentary series on Egypt. There’s always some new information on politics or on anything fucked up in the news.

It’s the best place to go to for all things fucked up. If there’s anything fucked up—some new video or crazy, fucked-up story, it’s going to be on the message board almost immediately.

Like 2 girls 1 cup.

Exactly. It’s a really active community; there are thousands and thousands of members and there’s one million, four-hundred-something thousand posts on the board. It’s really active, for whatever reason. And it’s been active since I’ve had it up, and I’ve had it up for almost 10 years.

Would you have beaten Wesley Snipes?

Who knows, man. Anything can happen. The idea of two grown men throwing their bones at each other—anything can happen.

But I was pretty confident that I could have beaten him. That’s why I was willing to do it.

Who in Hollywood is a hands-down victory for you? One-on-one, in the ring, who would you absolutely, no-question-about-it beat?

Who knows—who cares. I have no aspirations for competition. I enjoy commenting on it, but—the only reason I was willing to do this Wesley Snipes thing is because it was so ridiculous. It was their idea; completely, 100%.

How crazy would that be? Me and Wesley Snipes fighting in a cage. I don’t want to go fighting people that know how to fight, but I’ll choke some crazy dude.

What’s it like to interview someone that’s coming out of a UFC fight? They must be in a pretty weird state.

It’s really weird when they get knocked out. Because you’re interviewing a guy that’s only like 40% there; he can move around and he can walk and he can talk, but he barely remembers what just happened. And sometimes they don’t remember it at all.

Many times, when guys get knocked out really badly, it’s pointless to talk to them. This guy Mirko Kirkov got head-kicked by this guy Gabriel Gonzaga, and he got knocked out really badly. It was a terrible knock-out. And afterwards they wanted me to interview him. I wanted to ask the producer, “What is he going to say? He doesn’t even know what happened.”

Photo courtesy Dan Dion

Have you ever performed in Austin?

Yeah—I made a DVD in Austin way back in 2000. It’s one of my favorite places to perform. I love it there, man; it’s awesome.

It’s a very unusual little city. This really intelligent, liberal, open-minded city with all these creative arts influences. It seems really hippy, and it’s in the middle of Texas. It’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” How did you guys get this really open-minded city in the middle of Texas?

I don’t know—are you asking me? I don’t know.

Yeah. How did that happen?

I don’t know. The water?

The water? What the fuck’s in the water, man? We’ve got water everywhere.

Our reservoirs are full of recycled bong water. It’s weed.

What’s the weed situation in Austin? Is it illegal—will they arrest you for it?

Yeah. They’ll arrest you for it.

Isn’t that hilarious? Bars everywhere—you can buy a drink anytime you want and weed will get you thrown in a cage.

There was a drive-through beer store across the street from where I used to live. It was a hollowed-out barn and you could just drive through and they’d stick a keg in your trunk.

Amazing. What they need to do is figure out a way to pass medical marijuana in Texas. That’s the key; once they pass medical marijuana in states, everything else kind of relaxes.

Yeah, it snowballs from there. What can someone expect from your stand-up?

I do “Here’s the world through my eyes.” I tell people what I think about everything; what I think is funny about everything in life. From the fact that we’re a bunch of talking monkeys on a rock flying through the universe to how ridiculous it is that we’re obsessed with celebrities to how crazy war is. Life, death—you name it. Politics, religion, drugs. It’s all of my condensed observations on the world around me.

The best way to find out about my comedy is to go to my website—JoeRogan.net. It’s dot-net, not dot-com; dot-com is a real estate dude from Boise. He wants a lot of money for that dot-com, too. Fuck.

Reading my blogs is the best way to get an idea of what my comedy is like. And if my blogs offend you, you’re fucked. If you come see me live, you’re going to fall apart.

Do you still do a Q&A at the end?

Sometimes. The only time I don’t is if there’s two shows and I have to get the people out for the second show. But I almost always do it at the late show.

It’s interesting. I like people just yelling out random shit and we can talk about it. As long as they understand that I don’t know where any of this is going. Don’t expect a structured interaction. If you can hang with just us talking, we can have some fun for a little bit.

I just don’t ever want to bore them. I don’t want people to be hanging around because they’re trying to be polite but they wish the show ended 20 minutes ago. So there’s a fine line between giving them a lot of entertainment and opening up to them a lot and then boring the shit out of them. You’ve got to find that comfortable medium.

Are there any plans to follow up Shiny Happy Jihad?

Definitely. I took a long time between my first CD and my second CD, and I think that’s kind of unfortunate. I was busy doing the Fear Factor thing and I just got lazy, I guess.

After doing Fear Factor for so long—and even after doing NewsRadio, which I actually enjoyed—I really have a sense of what I like to do with my life. You always think that there are gigs you have to take because they’re offering you a lot of money. I think doing that with Fear Factor ultimately was a good idea because it definitely helped me and it got more people to know who I am. But now that I’ve done that, I think I should do the shit that I enjoy. And the thing that I enjoy the most is stand-up comedy.

Between stand-up comedy and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, I really don’t feel like I have any jobs. I feel like everything I do is just fun stuff that I get paid for. To me, that’s the ideal way to live. If I can keep this up somehow and just do comedy and just do the UFC, I would be more than happy to avoid ever going on television again and doing some wacky fucking game show just because I have to pay my mortgage.

I would way rather just do what I’m doing right now. Life is short; it doesn’t last very long. And I’ve wasted plenty of time as it is.