In 2007, some woefully misguided comedy gatekeepers decided that Joe Rogan couldn’t put asses in seats without Fear Factor boosting his public profile — sounds like someone skipped their morning Alpha Brain.
Today, in 2024, there isn’t a single comedy club in America that wouldn’t jump at the chance to host Rogan as a headliner unless they held strong convictions about vaccinations, immigration or Brendan Schaub. Through his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, the former Fear Factor host commands a larger following than any other stand-up comedian alive, and the fiscal impact of his association with products, projects or performance venues could only be compared to how the famous “Oprah Effect” generated massive demand for businesses endorsed by Oprah Winfrey among the exact opposite population from Rogan’s following.
However, in those in-between years after Rogan’s hosting gig on Fear Factor ended and before he became the single most successful podcaster in the medium’s history, one comedy club decided that the future nucleus of the Manosphere was about as enticing a headliner as a coffin full of cockroaches, according to Rogan’s account from a recent episode of JRE.
During his conversation with stand-up comedian Sam Tallent, 56-year-old Rogan revealed that, back when he used to play at clubs that he didn’t own, one of his regular spots tried to pull a fast one on him after NBC cancelled Fear Factor and put the comic out of a day job. “There was a club that, when Fear Factor had ended, they decided that — even though I’d sold out like every show every time I had been there for years, they decided that I wasn’t a draw anymore,” he explained.
Seeing as Rogan was no longer a TV star, this club tried to short-change Rogan on his performance fee, or as he put it, “They tried to decrease my amount by 25 percent. And I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ They’re like, ‘We don’t think you’re a draw anymore.’ ‘But I sold out a year ago, when I was here. Like, what are you saying?’”
Rogan declined to name names, only saying of the penny-pinching promoter, “It was one of those big clubs, big company that has a lot of clubs.”
Rogan refused to take a pay cut and stopped performing at the offending club. Two years later, Rogan launched his podcast, and as his star grew well past the heights he reached during his TV days, the company made multiple attempts to rebuild the bridge they burned by being cheapskates, but Rogan never bit. Today, on top of his massive platform, nine-figure Spotify deal and hordes of rabid fans, Rogan owns his own comedy club, The Mothership in Austin, Texas, where he decides who is a “draw.”
In retrospect, that unnamed club is like that high school basketball coach who cut Michael Jordan from the team — so long as you consider Joe Rogan to be the Michael Jordan of making up bullshit about COVID.
