Joe Rogan

Oh cool, man. The CD is better because I did the special like two years ago.

No, it was originally meant to be released on Netflix and then be sold in stores. Then they got some deal with Showtime and that took a long time. The people who produced it, not Netflix, but the actual human beings were fucking weird. So it was a long tedious process but, like I said, the CD is actually much better and newer.

I know Michael because we have the same manager and he’s really talented and cool guy. It was all the people that he was working with that turned out to be the monkeywrech in the gears. But whatever, it’s coming out.

I just wanted to get my material out. I really didn’t care what it looked like. I haven’t released anything since like 2000 so it was just a matter of getting material out. I was doing all this touring and getting all these people to come see me from being on the radio or people that know me from Fear Factor or people that have seen me do comedy already.

I’m always doing standup and I’m always writing new materials so it just got to the point where we got the deal with Comedy Central and decided to put out this CD. Then when Fear Factor was done, I had some time so I organized a lot of material and did a lot of sets until it was real sharp and just went up to San Francisco and banged it out.

I write but I don’t like to sit down and try to write jokes. I’ll sit down and try and write about shit I’m thinking about or something I’m reading about or in the news or whatever. I write blog entries a lot of times and I’ll write things out, and out of those thoughts I’ll get ideas that will become bits. Then I’ll take those and bring them on stage and fuck around with them and see what happens. They really come alive on stage. There’s something about sitting in front of a computer and putting things on a Microsoft Word file that doesn’t seem to let it come out in joke form. But a lot of times it’ll start off as one thing and then completely morph until it becomes something totally different. A lot of times, the initial idea is just a doorway to get into another idea that I didn’t even expect to come up with.

Fear Factor was always just a gig. I remember agreeing to do it in the first place, I was like “What the fuck is this?” It was one of those things that I never thought was going to go anywhere and just be this weird show that was on for a few episodes then got yanked. I was more willing to do it because it was so crazy. The idea that we were going to set dogs on people and put them in a pit and cover them with rats was so strange. I never thought that it would last as long as it did.

Yeah, it was very strange. It was very indicative of how weird the climate of reality TV really is.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I always made fun of it on stage even though the producers would be like, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Come on man, you got to make fun of this thing. I’m not hurting it if I make fun of it. I’m not saying, “Please don’t watch this piece of shit.” I’m just saying “What the fuck are we doing?”

Well, I wasn’t that good in the beginning. I think the only way you can really be honest is if you’re good enough to express yourself and make something entertaining about your honesty. Just being honest isn’t enough. In the beginning, you’ve got to make people laugh. I always look at comedy as three stages. In the beginning stage, it’s just “Fuck it” and do whatever you can to get laughs so you’re just writing stuff that you think people will laugh at. Then you start writing stuff that you think is funny and the next stage is you try to make people laugh with your ideas and philosophies. That’s when you get to be a real comic. Not that people that just write jokes aren’t real comics but I mean the comedy that I really appreciate like Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks or [Sam] Kinison. Those are all guys that had ideas about life and about the world and they got people to laugh at those ideas.

Yeah, that’s what I used to do for a living before I was a comedian. I used to teach Tae Kwon Do at Boston University and I had my own school in Boston.

What happened mostly is that I got talked into doing it by people I worked out with. I was always a fan of comedy. A lot of us that are comedians got into comedy because we would go to a comedy show and then would tell those jokes we heard to our friends. It feels great to tell a good joke. When people tell you jokes it is not even necessarily that they think it’s going to make you feel good, they’re doing it because it feels good to them when you laugh. If you can say something to someone and that person laughs at something you said, for whatever weird reason human beings get this charge from that. I don’t necessarily know or understand what it is but it’s a real thing and that’s how everybody gets into comedy. I used to make people laugh mainly in the locker room when I was doing martial arts or sparring or doing a tournament.

Yeah, it’s a lot different. Beating someone up is a very strange feeling that never really felt good. It definitely feels better to win than to lose but when I was fighting it was these great periods of stress followed by great periods of relief. The great periods of stress always led up to the fighting, especially with the last fight I had. I was 22 so I was really fucking nervous. I had my first full-contact martial arts fight when I was 15 so it was really scary to grow up in that environment and from that I developed a gallows sense of humor to alleviate stress.

You know what he is man, he’s a guy that’s figured out how to tune in to the frequency that retards operate on. I’ve watched him and I don’t understand it. I don’t know what people are laughing at but I’ve seen that he is good at tuning into that frequency that dullards are on. He really rocks that frequency.

Oh for sure. I have no problem with simple minded comedy. I might not enjoy it. I might not want to see it. I might go, “ugh” and want to leave the room but I would never tell that person to stop doing it and I would never tell the people who enjoy it to not enjoy it. As long as you’re not promoting hate or doing anything fucked up or lying to people, who cares? Pop music sucks and so does pop comedy. The real problem is that he’s stealing other people’s art. Everyone’s process is different as far as standup comedy. I know a lot of comics who don’t write things, like they don’t ever write things like blog entries or they don’t ever write journal entries, they just write jokes. But no matter what your process is, it’s a long fucking process to come up with a full form joke. It takes a lot of writing and rewriting and having to manipulate it, you have to try it out on stage and rework it. The problem with that process is that even after it’s done, you really run the risk of a douchebag like Carlos coming in and just fucking swiping it especially if you’re not famous or haven’t been on HBO. I’ve seen it happen with that guy over and over and over again. It is so fucking maddening and what was really frustrating was that all the comics were afraid of saying anything about it because they were afraid of looking jealous. A lot of these guys that steal are really ambitious and really ambitious people tend to be pretty fucking successful and once they are successful they have power, so comics don’t want to say anything. Also the fact that the club owners didn’t do shit about it was pretty frustrating too. It’s like, you’re providing an environment where these people work on their material and you’ve got a thief amongst you. You’ve got a guy who is a fucking cannibal stealing people’s shit and you don’t even care. They don’t do anything to reprimand them. We’re completely and totally on our own and it’s a weird fucking business. The art of stand up comedy is so appreciated by people but the process and the people that create it get virtually no respect. It’s almost looked down upon like it’s an embarrassing art form. You hear, “All comedians steal” and that is total horseshit. No, they don’t.

It is a sucky fucking feeling.

You’d be setting a precedent because it hasn’t been done before. Louis CK contemplated suing Dane Cook because Dane Cook stole his bits pretty blatantly. For Louis’ CD from 2001, he was working his bits out at The Laugh Factory while Dane was working out his CD. So for sure Dane saw him do those bits. Dane does this all the time with everybody, he sits in the back of the room and he watches their sets, especially if someone’s good. If you listen to the majority of Dane’s material you realize that he’s not an incredibly introspective guy, he’s not thinking anything that other people aren’t thinking. There’s no original thought, he’s doing some sort of a young girl populous comedy. He’s doing stuff that's going to be non-offensive and find a broad audience. He’s going to pick and choose stuff that he thinks is going to get him the largest group of listeners. Louis’ comedy is really absurd, bizarre and really great creative stuff. But it’s the perfect stuff for a guy like Dane to rip off. So Louis was contemplating suing him for a while but it was right before his Lucky Louie TV show came out and he didn’t want to come off looking bitter which I think was a mistake. At the time Louis wasn’t as high profile as I am from Fear Factor so he thought that people were going to think that he was just bitter. But it is pretty obvious if you listen to those bits back to back. No one can listen to those bits and not think that Dane stole them.

He’s another one, when I listen to Robin Williams’ comedy I have no fucking idea what people are laughing at.

But even the old days, man. I never got it. He was just saying a bunch of shit really fast and every now and then some of it was slightly humorous. People were laughing at the fact that he delivered it with this manic energy but they were a cavalcade of other people’s ideas. That’s what he does. He’s a very talented actor, you have to give the guy that but I think he’s such a talented actor because he’s fucking crazy and that same crazy gives him the ability to completely disrespect other people’s creative ideas and swipe them.

I don’t know but this is an opportunity for the general public to view it in a much more honest way than has already been presented. There’s no way anyone can look at that video we put together not think, at the very least, he’s a liar. First of all, I say that he stole from my friend Ari [Shaffir] when Ari opened for him. Carlos then said that Ari never opened for him which is a fucking complete and total lie. He opened for him a bunch of times. But Carlos didn’t know Ari was in the room. So I bring Ari on stage and Carlos doesn’t say, “You didn’t open for me,” then all of a sudden it was, “I did that joke first.” What the fuck is he talking about? I thought he didn’t open for you. Now you’re saying he did open for you and you did the joke first? Carlos said that George Lopez slammed him up against the wall because George Lopez didn’t want other Hispanic comedians to succeed. That’s psychotic and it doesn’t make any sense at all but that’s the person you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with someone who’s a charismatic psycho. He says crazy shit but he’s saying it with full confidence. There are fucking people that believe him and the crazy thing is I get emails from these people and I post them sometimes on the boards. Some of them are fucking scary.

A lot of them say that. There’s a ton of them in the comments section of my MySpace page, they’re always saying, “So what if Carlos steals, he does that shit better.” Which is hilarious because if someone stole your car and was fucking driving down the street and everybody was like, “Hey man, that’s a nice car,” you’d be like, “What the fuck, you stole my car.” “But so what bro, that guy drives that shit better.” Ideas and intellectual property rights are intangible for retards. They don’t grasp it.

It’s not a good example. We banged that video as quick as we could. Ari definitely was one of the first guys to do that bit and he did it back when it wasn’t even really a true story. It’s a very obvious premise, once you find out they are going to build a super wall so okay, who’s going to build it? Mexicans build everything. That’s complete parallel thinking, anybody can come up with that but the point was that Ari was doing that bit while he was opening for Carlos. When Carlos started doing the bit, he did it in exactly the same way Ari did it with the same hand motion, “Um, excuse me” which is not his forte. Carlos is not a subtle comedian. He’s not the guy who would go, “Who’s going to build this thing?” He gets up and goes, “Let me ask you, who the fuck is going to build this wall? Mexicans!” That’s how he would do the bit. He did it that way because he’s being a mynah bird. He’s seeing how Ari did it and he’s duplicating it exactly. It’s not the best example because a lot of people did that joke but it is definitely indicative of what he does.

I saw one where it’s Carlos’ response. It was so retarded that I had to turn it off after three minutes.

Well, I didn’t plan this at all. The only reason why this happened was because Carlos was in the club when I was on stage and I brought up the next comedian saying the guy opens up for Carlos Men-steal-ia. It’s such a bad situation over at The Comedy Store that they have a warning signal for when he’s in the room so comics can stop doing bits. It’s like being around a guy who’s going to fucking steal from your house. He’s walking around the front yard and you’ve got to keep an eye on him, it’s really gross.

But when he decided to go on stage and call me out, I was not looking at that like it was an opportunity to do some publicity and if I was, I would admit it. I would say, “Hey I want to get people to listen to my album so I’m going to fucking goof on this retard” but that’s not what it was. For me, it was an opportunity to expose him. It was like the universe presented me a gift. Carlos gets on stage, so cocky and full of himself like they were going to go, “Carlos is here!” He believes he’s like Richard Pryor and that he was going to silence this and make me look stupid. Then as the altercation went on, it became more and more painfully obvious that he was getting trounced and it got weirder and weirder and uglier and uglier until at the end we see that he’s a beaten man. I was like, “You don’t even know you steal, do you?” and he was like “maybe, maybe” and I was “Maybe? Are you listening to yourself?” Then after it was all over and we had all this footage, I was like “Let’s fucking skewer this guy, let’s show everybody what’s up.” In hindsight, since there were like 30 comedians in the room that were screaming and cheering that he steals, I should have had them come on stage one by one and tell the jokes that Carlos steals.

Honestly, all I really like doing is things like standup comedy and doing the commentary for the UFC. I don’t really even want to do other stuff anymore. If my audience on the road stayed the same it is now, I would be very happy. I have a good base of fans that come out to see me and even though I would say that out of all the people that know who I am, maybe only about 20% of them even know that I’m a comedian. But that 20% is enough to fill clubs and to have a good time. All I’m trying to be in this life is be creatively fulfilled, have a good time with my friends and enjoy my life. I don’t have any grand plans as far as careers because at a certain point in time, I started to realize that this was all bullshit and I’m going to die and so are you. This whole existence is just a blip in the greater spectrum of the universe. Human beings are all fucking temporary so this whole idea of leaving behind a career or having a legacy or building a career, is bullshit. What you should do in this life is enjoy your friends, have a good time, do what you like doing and don’t waste any time.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck