My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous upset…’
Rogan is marketed as an edgy alternative to the mainstream media. He is about as edgy as Banksy
I jest. I actually do know what happened in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball. It was the first thing I watched because that was what was on when I walked into the room and broke my duck. Italy beat the long-standing champions the United States, which delighted me enormously. One of the things that had most annoyed me about the Olympics when I wasn’t watching was hearing the American national anthem on autorepeat, from the TV room, as they won yet another gold.
Later I got briefly very excited that a nice English woman I had never heard of before, and whose name I have since forgotten, won the 800 metres in spectacular fashion. I also got mildly diverted by the Team GB girl Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix – who, after a few shaky attempts, got beaten to the medals by the near perfect-scoring Chinese in the diving – mainly because her dad is the French bloke who presents First Dates on Channel 4. And that’s it. That’s all I saw. Did quite well, didn’t I?
The Olympics are presumably a good time for all the networks to bury bad TV. Maybe that’s why Netflix chose to release Joe Rogan’s alleged comedy special right in the middle. Rogan is a former US sports commentator (mixed martial arts) who has somehow managed to parlay his minor celebrity and blandly amiable jockishness into a multi-gazillion dollar career as the world’s biggest podcaster. But labelling him a ‘stand-up comedian’, I would suggest, is an implausibility too far.
Rogan is marketed as a kind of edgy alternative to the mainstream media. In reality, he is about as edgy as Banksy. (Explanation for American readers: not very). But he does his best. For example, when he had Elon Musk on one of his interminable podcasts (his longest lasted five hours and 19 minutes), they famously shared a joint.
‘I mean it’s legal, right,’ said Musk as he took the proffered reefer. And there’s your problem, right there. Yes, maybe back in the Ronald Reagan 1980s when – if it was your third offence – it could have landed you an automatic 25-year prison sentence that would indeed have been pretty risqué. But in 2024? You must be kidding. Marijuana smoking is so ubiquitous in most US states – and indeed right across the world – that it’s almost compulsory. The really out-there thing for Rogan to be doing nowadays would be to push out the old ‘just say no’ mantra.
Still, he knows how to please a crowd. The first part of his comedy set from the Majestic Theater in San Antonio was dedicated to how amazingly blessed he felt to live in Texas, how Texans were truly the most wonderful people in the world, and none more wonderful than the ones who’d paid (or perhaps been paid: who knows?) to see Joe Rogan, live, at the Majestic Theater, San Antonio. This went down well.
After that, he could have read extracts from the Big Bumper Compendium of Old Jokes and still have been treated like the world’s funniest man. Indeed, that was pretty much what he did. One minute he was riffing on the subject of aliens and their apparent fascination with intimate personal investigations on humans (which South Park dealt with in 1997 in its very first episode, titled ‘Cartman Gets An Anal Probe’); the next he was recycling an old Joan Rivers gag about Michelle Obama and then swiftly retracting it in case, heaven forfend, anyone thought he was being serious. Stick to the podcast, Joe.
For times like these – telly is always thin in August – what you really need is MUBI. This is a subscription channel which gives you access to films you’re unlikely to find anywhere else: all those brilliant, usually foreign, elliptical, dreamy, thought-provoking arthouse films which you would have gone to see at the cinema if only you’d realised – before it was too late – that they were being shown.
We’ve watched some crackers in the last few months: Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (Billy Budd transported to the French Foreign Legion in 1990s Djibouti); Agnès Varda’s 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 (in which you get to see Paris as you would like it still to be); Wim Wender’s Perfect Days (more involving than a movie about a Tokyo public toilet cleaner has any right to be) and, most recently, Alice Rohrwacher’s mesmerising La Chimera (about a moody Englishman expatriate in 1980s Tuscany, who scrapes his artfully dishevelled living plundering Etruscan tombs).
You can be sure Joe Rogan won’t have watched any of them.
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.