LC#29: Platform Comedy

On the becoming platform of Joe Rogan.

Hello folks, look who’s back in your inboxes. I realise this might feel like a bit of a “cold“ call after being on (newsletter) hiatus such a long time, but I really needed to focus on my academic stuff, and then life just took me elsewhere until now. Nonetheless, I am happy to revive this now officially occasional intrusion into your everyday readings because, for once, my academic research and my newsletter research have converged. I shall explain that after the usual links, so scroll away.

In terms of comedy and platforms, AI comedy is definitely a big topic right now. Here’s a couple cool links:

This exploration of chatGPT’s goy gaze and approach to Jewish humour is excellently titled, header-ed, and generally a great read.

And this is “AI OR DIE: The First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show” (via):

Made this myself… Never played Yu-gi-oh but I thought it was a good way to represent the multi-platform dimension of JRE

I have already written about Joe Rogan on this newsletter, more specifically here. In the past couple years, the ideas drafted in that piece have bubbled up and developed into a full-on academic paper about JRE, cancel culture, and platformisation. You can read the piece for yourself, but this is the jist of it: the universalist belief in free speech makes podcasting comedians akin to cultural promoters of values similar to those championed by free software activists, but their alliance with tech billionaires like Elon Musk also reveals the more cynical side of what winds up being an intrinsically American, necessarily capitalist creative class. Rogan in particular plays a very influential yet slippery role in the cultural negotiation with platform power, shifting the window of discourse around his interests, low-key political affinities, and perception of cancel culture. In other words, as I write in the paper:

Rogan’s investment in “free speech” is […] framed as a heroic individual battle, one in which the comedian himself embodies a platform, thinks like a platform, and talks with other platforms as something that would happen naturally, with or without capitalistic imperatives.

This becoming platform of Joe Rogan takes different forms, beyond those I explore in the paper. Let’s mention two: the comedy infrastructure he’s been creating with his move to Texas, and the more dispersed, symbolic explosion of Rogan’s likeness and persona as an avatar of disruption.

photo from the Comedy Mothership Instagram account

Apart from hosting discourse on his media platform, Rogan has in fact initiated a geographical migration of former LA comics - often transplants from the Comedy Store crop - to the fast-expanding Austin, TX scene. By materially establishing a sanctuary to his own comedy universe, the Comedy Mothership, Rogan has opened a true “stargate” (an extraterrestrial hint to his own imaginary, which backdrops the stage of one of the club’s rooms), a space-time continuum between the digital platform age and Austin as the natural intersection between edgy comedy, conspiracy theorists, and the tech industry. Not everyone is happy with the impact Rogan’s entourage has had on the local comedy scene, but JRE and the Kill Tony universe (its most direct comedy-focused, community-driven offshoot) have given flesh to the expanding influence of Rogan as the archetypical podcasting comedian, an avatar of free speech with one hand feeding (into) the comedy world and the other shaking hands with figures like Elon Musk. Rogan is still materially dependent on mainstream platforms like Spotify and YouTube (as well as Netflix, which hosted his most recent live special), but in my opinion his closeness to powerful and controversial tech figures like the Twitter-buying billionaire helps not only to maintain the weird, edgy relevance of his podcast, but might also develop into future platform alliances if ever needed - not unlike Russel Brand’s move towards alt-tech platform Rumble, whose funders include people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, but closer to Musk’s own capricious political leanings and personality-driven policies.

Beyond my own projections about the future of platformed media and comedian podcasters, Rogan’s avatar status has definitely turned his own likeness and body into malleable matter for cultural and aesthetic speculations, making him one of the first celebrities to be associated with the disruptive power of AI. The first hypothetical interview published by the Joe Rogan AI Experience is in fact with OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

What is interesting about this channel is that it mimics JRE’s style and stages fictional interviews that are yet plausible to the point of banality - indeed, in this respect bearing an uncanny similarity to the original. What is missing, however, is Rogan’s performative conviction and meandering fascination, a dimension the constellation of JRE-hating accounts that have started sprawling on YouTube have not left unexplored. If formats like Kill Tony and the myriad podcasts like Two Bears One Cave, The Fighter and the Kid, or Flagrant worship Rogan and its cultural impact, there is also a growing JRE-haterverse creeping just at the margins of it, engendering its own formats and tropes - they dissect jokes, track their disputed origins, map out slippages in body language, and so on.

From video essays like the one above (rapidly garnering a cult following) to professionalised hate-streamers who dissect every single move on every single podcast of the Rogan-sphere, Rogan’s YouTube personality has indeed become a medium, a performance genre, and a platform infrastructure - fitting with a model Emily Rosamond describes as “platformed personality capitalism”. The abundance of parodies and clickbait is obviously testament to Rogan’s powerful status, but such a distribution of his image also reflects the need for a critical grasp of the communicative models that have now ascended into the mainstream (or, at the very least, for venting about them). Zooming in on the sweat stains forming on Rogan’s nipples in his Nextflix special may be just a funny way to poke fun at a powerful man, but it also highlights what is perhaps a blind spot in the discourse on comedy platforms: more - money, views, specials - in not always more, and the platformed success trickle down effect championed by Rogan himself cannot extricate itself from critique, especially when predicated on a free speech mantra. In other words, becoming platform opens up a porosity and vulnerability to critique, it invites multitudes.