At previous headliner shows, audiences showed a fair amount of respect, but an unruly crowd made Joe Rogan’s show less effective than it could be. Then again, Rogan’s set might have been better had he not put his disclaimer closer to the end of his set — that he doesn’t believe in everything he says on stage.
Opening the night, however, was Tony Hinchcliffe, an L.A. comedian who also had the unfortunate task of dealing with people in the crowd yelling “Where’s Joe?” Before he quickly dispatched a woman saying exactly that, Hinchcliffe told a great extended story of encountering an AutoZone employee with an eye patch. Hinchcliffe made a joke to the man about his eyepatch, only for the man to make a better joke in return.
Hinchcliffe also told great jokes about being a man “with a gay face” and an L.A. restaurant that caters exclusively to dogs. It was around this time that a woman yelled “Where’s Joe?” and Hinchcliffe spent a solid few minutes making fun of her before returning to his story.
Joe Rogan, meanwhile, has a set that can turn from jokes about Sasquatch to a joke about MMA very, very quickly. It’s hard to know where he’s going to go next, which is probably why so much of the audience was along for the ride throughout.
As mentioned above, his disclaimer that he doesn’t believe all that he says on stage could have been said much, much earlier, especially after saying things like “women cannot rape men.” Rogan said that as a comedian, he’ll go with what he thinks is funnier, even if what he says is the farthest from politically correct.
Rogan may have been at his best when he was talking about current events, especially after he went on an extended rant about our place in the universe (Rogan speculates Earth may be the “Tijuana” of our galaxy). He ripped into the viral “Ice Bucket Challenge,” especially in California where participants were dumping buckets of water on their heads amid a drought.
He also had a lot of fun debunking urban legends, like Bigfoot, which he actually searched for as part of his SyFy TV show Joe Rogan Questions Everything. While talking about this, someone yelled “Chemtrails!” and Rogan quickly laughed it off.
The scattered nature of his set may have been partly because he was testing new material, and it seemed like the audience responded well to most of it. He ended up going far over his allotted time, so the audience definitely got its money’s worth.
