My resolution for this summer was to see how far I could get in the Olympics without watching a single event. That’s harder than you think, especially when the kids are constantly calling from the living room: “Daddy, daddy, Romania is playing Burkina Faso in the women’s beach volleyball final and there was a huge surprise…”
Rogan is marketed as an edgy alternative to the mainstream media. He is about as edgy as Banksy
I’m kidding. I actually know what happened in the women’s beach volleyball final. It was the first thing I watched because it was on when I walked into the room and conceded defeat. Italy beat the long-time champions, the USA, which made me so happy. One of the things that annoyed me most about the Olympics when I wasn’t watching was hearing the American national anthem on repeat from the TV room when they won gold once again.
Later, I was briefly excited when a nice Englishwoman I’d never heard of and whose name I’ve since forgotten won the 800m in spectacular fashion. I was also a little distracted by team athlete Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix – who, after a few wobbly attempts, was beaten to the medals in the diving by the almost perfect Chinese – mainly because her father is the Frenchman presenting the medals. First dates on Channel 4. And that’s it. That’s all I saw. It was pretty good, wasn’t it?
The Olympics are probably a good time for all networks to bury bad TV. Maybe that’s why Netflix decided to release Joe Rogan’s supposed comedy special right in the middle of it. Rogan is a former US sportscaster (mixed martial arts) who somehow managed to parlay his minor celebrity and understatedly lovable athleticism into a multibillion-dollar career as the world’s biggest podcaster. But calling him a “stand-up comedian” is going too far in my opinion.
Rogan is marketed as a sort of edgy alternative to the mainstream media. In reality, he’s about as edgy as Banksy. (Explanation for American readers: not very). But he does his best. For example, when he hosted Elon Musk on one of his endless podcasts (his longest was five hours and 19 minutes), they famously shared a joint.
“I mean, it’s legal,” Musk said as he accepted the offered joint. And that’s where you have your problem. Yes, maybe in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, when if it was your third offense, you could automatically get a 25-year prison sentence, which would have been pretty daring indeed. But in 2024? That’s a joke. Marijuana smoking is so ubiquitous in most U.S. states – and indeed, the world – that it’s almost mandatory. The really crazy thing Rogan could do these days would be to spread the old mantra, “Just say no.”
Still, he knows how to get an audience excited. The first part of his comedy program at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio was devoted to how incredibly blessed he felt to live in Texas, that Texans really are the most wonderful people in the world, and that no one is more wonderful than those who had paid (or maybe were paid: who knows?) to see Joe Rogan live at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio. It went down well.
After that, he could have read excerpts from the Big Bumper Compendium of Old Jokes and still been treated like the funniest person in the world. And that’s exactly what he was. At one point he improvised about aliens and their apparent fascination with intimate personal investigations of humans (which South Park (The subject was covered in the very first episode in 1997, titled “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe”); in the next episode, he recycled an old Joan Rivers gag about Michelle Obama, then quickly retracted it in case, God forbid, anyone thought he was serious. Stick with the podcast, Joe.
At times like these—TV is always thin on the ground in August—you need MUBI. It’s a subscription channel that gives you access to films you’re unlikely to find anywhere else: all those brilliant, mostly foreign, elliptical, dreamy, thought-provoking arthouse films that you would have seen in the cinema if only you’d realized—before it was too late—that they were showing.
We have seen some blockbusters in the last few months: Claire Denis’ Beautiful Work (Billy Budd transported to the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti in the 1990s); Agnès Varda’s 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 (in which you see Paris as you would like it to be); Wim Wenders Perfect days (more gripping than a film about a cleaning lady in a Tokyo public toilet could be) and most recently Alice Rohrwacher’s fascinating La Chimera (about a moody English expat in 1980s Tuscany who salvages his artfully disheveled life by looting Etruscan tombs).
You can be sure that Joe Rogan hasn’t seen any of them.
