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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections. You can support the author directly at patreon.com/christophersloce. There is exclusive writing there, as well, like this column about TV Tropes. 

This is, without a doubt, the least funny comedy has been in my lifetime, even out pacing the Blue Collar Comedy Tour/Mind of Mencia days of the mid-to-late 2000s that sent me running for a copy of Comedians of Comedy in my late adolescence. Comedy has also never been more important. These two things are directly related. 

It all comes down to money: there have been gallons of ink spilled about Joe Rogan and the prefab comedy scene in Austin. Not unlike Dimes Square and its Thielbucks, Joe Rogan stands as living proof that billionaires don’t have good taste in anything. The parallels continue: if the Thiel influence was about a) convincing people identity politics had become decoupled from democratic demands via “edgy” art and and that b) because of this failure to reign in identity politics, democracy had failed, then the Rogan influence is sadder and smaller and only important through our own bizarre politics. Dimes Square worshipped an idea of art that was supposedly without the stultifying influence of the political, and Rogan argues because comedy is one of the highest art forms on the planet, it can’t be refrained by the political. My entire argument that these guys are full of shit is that everyone from Cum Town is at close to the height of their careers. Perhaps because those three guys are to the left of the Democratic party (not hard) in everything but the content of their jokes this is a sign liberals oppressing free speech. My response to that: Theo Van and his medieval peasant hair cut were both at the State of the Union and blow lines with Jared Kushner on the regular.

What has not been discussed as a separate phenomenon (though it’s certainly been reported on) is the backlash. Marc Maron has decided to end WTF,  so it was finally time to say what he needed to say about the Austin comedy thing. The more esoteric critique comes from a duo of videos about Joe Rogan made by Elephant Graveyard. Using a style of editing inspired both by Vic Berger and Adam Curtis, these video essays chart the entire history of Joe Rogan. The second of the two videos, “How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Death Cult” gets a bit more sociological and dips into some Baudrillard and Jung references. Both of the Rogan videos are worth watching if you spend any time on YouTube, and managed to point out something I had never really noticed in all of this: for all of the mystification of the art of comedy that these guys do, a lot of them are not that funny. Even someone as close to being persona non grata for the mainstream like Louis CK (who still won a Grammy post the Troubles, mind you) isn’t running around screaming about how he’s not allowed to joke about jacking off anymore. He’s just doing stand-up. Whether or not he should be allowed to be in a place where he might abuse the level of influence he had or if he believes in “cancellation” is a different discussion, but Louis CK isn’t hanging out with Trump, and Joe Rogan is.

But let’s back up here and ask a real question: would Joe Rogan be a billionaire with a comedy club that’s locked down like Fort Knox without a view of comedy that came into being from the Obama era? Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart gained their reputations being voices against Bush. Stephen Colbert did the White House Press Correspondents dinner in character as the blowhard Colbert Report Stephen, making fun of Bush to him directly. A year before Occupy, two years into the most media savvy presidency in history, Colbert and Stewart held their Rally to Restore Sanity (Colbert remaining in character rallied to “restore fear”) . Stewart’s rally was predicated on a return to common sense that had left politics. Over the following years, Obama would have a series of comedians host the Press Correspondents dinner, all of whom were ‘cooler’ than one would expect. He even featured Keegan Michael-Key’s “anger translator” character from Key and Peele.  In those following years, we’d see a number of those comedians make shows about themselves; Masters of Reality and Louie are direct expressions of the new outsized importance of comedy by applying a couple of indie/prestige tv tricks to the “stand-up tv show” of Seinfeld. Amy Schumer was damn near a feminist icon. 

You’ll also note a lot of this hasn’t aged particularly well but when the opposite happens, comedy isn’t good either. Right wing Hari Kondabalu is the only way you can make him less funny. In a parody of the Obama cultural zeitgeist, we now have what the Helldude calls “the podcaster occupied government”. Obama could charm the tippy top of entertainment because his best ability was selling Clinton’s triangulation with a human face (arguably as fundamental to the establishment of American neoliberalism as Reaganomics because it accepted there was no alternative to outflanking Republicans). It’s fitting that the dominant Trump bases of support in our media come from a layer of also-rans who believe their ability to be entertaining is the same thing as understanding how the world works, and believe being entertaining is an expertise on its own. Dr Phil’s tough love barnyard talk means he’s the perfect person to oversee immigration raids. Joe Rogan understands everything because of the nebulous circle of 250 assassins he runs in. Tony Hinchcliffe tells good jokes because he’s at roasts, and therefore (in a clip shared in the Elephant Graveyard video we’ve all seen now) because he wrote a joke about the Canadian healthcare system, he understands how it operates better than you. The attraction to Trump is obvious: he went from being a game show host to a head of state, so why can’t Joe Rogan be a philosopher warrior? It just only begs the question of Barack Obama that why did you go from being the most powerful man in the world to an influencer. After all, it was Barack Obama who sent off Marc Maron’s WTF? this year. 

So the stage is set for this intra-elite debate about comedy: the evolutionary peaks of comedy prestige (or how Howard Stern gets treated as an institution) versus the descendents of drive time morning radio (Howard Stern laying the groundwork for his institutional success). It’s no accident that like the rise of conservative shock jocks (something that goes all the way back to the earliest days of radio) the defenders of the status quo and its spoils system become ironically conservative in their beliefs about a flawed democracy like our own. Joe Rogan’s Kali Yuga is visited upon him by the sage voices of Marc Maron; that aspect of Shiva himself Stavros Halkias destroys Bert Kreischer on his own podcast. It all winds up worshipping the same God, one that laughs.