Joe Rogan: Strange Times

He uses the "F-word" way too much. Like, it's not always necessary for the joke. It actually takes away from the joke because you're thinking, "My god he's said the F-word 16 times already!" With that being said, his jokes were pretty brilliant. He definitely gave us a funny way of looking at things! If it wasn't for all the constant neverending cussing, I'd give this a 10. He had me and my husband laughing quite a bit and nodding and saying things like, "Well, he's not wrong!" Very entertaining. We watched Russell Brand's new standup the other night, and this was much better. Much, much better.

PS- I don't know if he recycles the material from his podcasts because I don't follow that. So everything I heard was brand new to me.

This show is one hour. Which is a blessing, given the podcast can go up to three hours. The downside: there is no guest.

A solid piece of stand up comedy, Joe likes topics about vegans, animals, presidents and nominees. Just overall a good listen with some subtle underlying points that make you think.

8/10

He's not a very good stand up comedian. He's not the worst, but, without his crossover audience of UFC and podcast die-hards he wouldn't be seen as anything other than a slightly below average comedian. His delivery doesn't seem to be polished. He's just yelling most of the time which gets very annoying very fast. And if you've listened to his podcast you've already heard the material. I'm not sure if he's just pandering to his fans or if he really thinks that he's doing original, finely crafted material. At this point I think he's in such a bubble that he isn't really looking at his comedy with an objective lens or taking any kind of negative feedback seriously and all of his comedian friends that are legitimately funny won't give him honest feedback for fear of not being invited onto his podcast which would be a huge hit to them in terms of marketing their own career's.

He works hard and has been doing this for a long time. You can tell he's well prepared but, he's just not that funny. His delivery is overly shouty to the point of being annoying. He has strange body language sometimes, like how he grips the mic very tightly and holds his elbow up and out, it's like he's flexing his forearm at the crowd the whole time... it's weird, like a nervous comic thing but he's supposed to be this long term vet of the business and the way he talks about comedy on his podcast you'd think he was in the top tier of stand up comedy. All that could be forgiven though if not for one thing, his material is pretty bland and at times very shallow. If you've seen his podcast you've heard all of these jokes before. To quote Joe himself "there's an originality problem". I love his podcast, enjoy his UFC commentating, actually liked Newsradio, but have never been a fan of his stand up. I keep trying to give it a chance because of how he talks about the "process" of creating standup like he's an all time great but I constantly get disappointed but what he puts out on stage. He clearly doesn't have a lot of self awareness when it comes to his standup abilities (dunning kruger effect in action) and I'm starting to think the majority of his comedy fans (and high ratings) are coming from his die hard podcast followers who are more than a little biased. Watch for yourself though... always.