There’s a new comedy club that confiscates your phone so you can’t film the comedians on stage, so that if the act goes badly, no one can humiliate them on the internet. They even scan guests' faces before they enter, ensuring anyone who’s out of line can be tracked down. Will this wokeness never end? Is this new wave of comedians so weak-willed and pathetic that even a stand up stage must be a safe space? Men used to be men! When did the world become so soft? Can nobody take a joke anymore?!
I… oh, wait a second, I got a couple of facts wrong there. They really do take your phone and scan your face, but it’s not to create a safe space, but to fight them - that’s right, those are the rules at Joe Rogan’s anti-woke comedy club. Laughs are few, but without recording them on your phone, at least you only need to experience them once.
I’m not entirely sure why we need an anti-woke comedy club. It seems like the biggest comedians around are also ‘anti-woke’, whatever that really means. Louis CK, a white man who repeatedly says the n-word on stage and who has been accused of multiple counts of sexual harassment, still tours. Dave Chapelle, for all the noise of transphobia whenever he performs, is one of Netflix’s biggest stars and has leaned harder into being anti-woke since his first controversy.
It’s not just established chuckleheads either though - so many new comedians have acts that start with warnings that they’ll be cancelled or criticism of people who complain about offence, often to rapturous applause and in lieu of any jokes. The answer, when the discriminatory nature of their act is laid bare, is always that it’s a comedian’s job to challenge things. But if you’re playing at a club where you know you’re preaching to the choir, you’re not challenging anything. If you’ll only tell jokes about trans people to a crowd that already hates them and with no ‘threat’ of being recorded, what do you believe you are challenging, and how? You’re preaching to an echochamber when your humour and views never have an opportunity to be challenged in the first place, and if they ever are, you have the face of the person who did it on file, which feels like a threat in and of itself.
If you’re curious about the level of humour on offer at said club, the two stages are called Fat Man and Little Boy, after the two atom bombs used on Japan in the Second World War, and one of the opening headline shows is titled ‘Unvaxxed Sperm’. Let’s get away from the set-up though. I understand the appeal of wanting a crowd you know is broadly on your side, even if I think it completely undercuts the argument of wanting to challenge people with your comedy. Far harder to rationalise are the rules.
First off, there’s the phones. If you’re only willing to play to fans who 100 percent agree with you and have bought tickets to a club that specifically caters to being offensive, you’re probably a little insecure. Getting rid of phones ensures any potential embarrassment is local, not global, and also removes video evidence of you sucking. It’s clearly designed for this reason, but a good manure salesman like Rogan could make the case that it’s because the routines are so shocking and offensive, getting rid of phones allows the acts to really stick the knife into trans people.
The second is much harder to rationalise. The sorts of people who listen to Joe Rogan typically hate surveillance, invasion of privacy, and infringement on their personal liberties. And they’re correct to push back against these things. It’s not a sign of a right wing conspiracy nut to not like corporations owning your personal data. But if this were any other organisation keeping your image and personal data on file so they can easily locate you on a whim, Rogan would be blaming Biden, or China, or Biden working with China.
While everyone across the spectrum typically agrees that you should have agency over your personal data, Rogan is the type to capitalise on this sort of behaviour and spin it into a mania, filing his base up so they’re angry not about the thing that is happening (the surveillance), but what it represents (Biden/China). Now that he’s the one doing it, how does he square that? More to the point, how do his base the next time he blows up about something like this?
It’s a silly, fairly pathetic idea to make an anti-woke comedy club in the first place. To do it and then take several steps to ensure it’s a safe space for the big, brash comedians who pride themselves on challenging people is just embarrassing. Let’s all laugh at Joe Rogan’s anti-woke comedy club; it might be the only laughs they get.