'Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats' Reviews: Netflix "produces an underwhelming, exhausting, and lazily derivative hour of stand-up"

         On August 3, 2024, Netflix released 'Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats', which was a hit with the comedian and radio host's fans but a bomb for critics, who panned the comedy special, leaving it with a score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. But what exactly did the critics say? 

       Kathryn VanArendonk of Vulture says, "In his new Netflix live special, Burn the Boats, Joe Rogan imagines himself as a global court jester, a just-having-fun provocateur with a pert little “Did I do that?” approach to important issues of the day. It’s a game of inescapable blamelessness: If he’s right about all the stuff he’s yelling about, then great! Hope you had a good time. If he’s wrong, you’re the idiot for listening to him, and whatever — it’s just jokes! This is obviously an obnoxious approach to public commentary, but just as important in the context of Burn the Boats, it produces an underwhelming, exhausting, and lazily derivative hour of stand-up."

        Sean L. McCarthy of Decider notes, "He’s steadfastly stubborn about his nostalgia and desire to espouse offensive ideas for the sake of laughs, even if the laughs from the audience aren’t always coming from the right place. And he wants to continue to do so without consequence. Sort of."

        Daniel D'Addario of Variety states, "In utterly disavowing his own work even as it’s happening, Rogan shows that, for all he may have the trappings of a marquee Netflix comic, he lacks a fundamental quality the best comics share: Courage."Adding, "Throughout the special, Rogan seemed to be addressing or anticipating a hypothetical critic — so much so that criticizing him seems to be playing into his game. It seems naive to address, point by point, Rogan’s claims in the form of comedy. It’s an admixture of nasty cruelty (his description of the child of a “pregnant man” nursing was a failed-comic grotesque), faux-naivete (complaining about how “the world got weird” when Rogan himself is a prime mover in shaping American culture), and, ultimately, a sensibility that seems 10 years late. Beyond the subject of COVID — which Rogan notes up top changed many of his interpersonal relationships (one wonders why!) — little in this special feels like it couldn’t have addressed similar cultural wedges in 2013, right down to Rogan’s complaint that he can’t use certain slurs. (In getting those onto Netflix’s air, Rogan guaranteed his audacity would win the headlines his comedy could not, and earned his paycheck.)"

Photo by Felipe Bustillo on Unsplash

       Matthew Creith of TheWrap writes, "If you know Rogan, you know exactly what you’re getting with this special … even if the special’s title might need to be clarified for those not familiar with the idiom it offers."