“Joe feels easy saying certain things because he doesn’t have people who stop him. “He immediately got defensive and was, like, ‘Oh, come on,’” says Khaghani, who recalls that Rogan seemed taken aback by the criticism. Smoking a cigarette outside afterward, Khaghani says he complimented Rogan on his set, but also told him he didn’t need to use gay slurs gratuitously, especially in a gay-friendly city like Cambridge. It was low-key signaling to people that you’re the kind of guy who says ,” says Khaghani. He says Rogan was funny, but used a gay slur repeatedly, which Khaghani, who’s gay, found odd and unnecessary. You’d be lucky if they called you back 10 hours later.Ī dozen years ago, when comedian Mehran Khaghani was starting out in Boston, he went to see Rogan at the Comedy Studio, then located above the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square. “Every time a comic didn’t show up or couldn’t make it, you’d have to call someone. “In 1990, Joe was the first comic in the whole Boston area to have a cellphone, and it made him a lot of money,” says Blumenreich, who became friends with Rogan and still promotes his shows, including a sold-out appearance at TD Garden last October. Veteran comedy promoter Bill Blumenreich, who opened the Comedy Connection in Faneuil Hall in the late 1980s, says Rogan was ambitious from the outset. life is too important to be taken seriously” he wrote in his high school yearbook - so when his passion for kicking people (and being kicked) began to wane, a few UMass friends encouraged him to try stand-up. “I developed so much discipline and so much insight about life that I don’t think I really would have learned otherwise.”īut Rogan also had a knack for making people laugh - “. “I wouldn’t have achieved anything in life without martial arts,” he told Black Belt magazine in 2019. Before then, he’d been mostly focused on martial arts, which he’s said he took up as a teenager after a classmate in Newton put him in a headlock during a confrontation in a locker room.įiercely competitive and built like a fireplug, Rogan excelled at taekwondo, and eventually competed in - and won - multiple statewide taekwondo tournaments. where he did stand-up for the first time in 1988. Rogan has come a long way from Stitches, the defunct comedy club on Commonwealth Ave. In protest of his anti-vaccination comments, several musical acts, including Neil Young, pulled their catalogs from Spotify, which reportedly paid as much as $200 million for the exclusive rights to stream “The Joe Rogan Experience.” In the past few weeks, Rogan has drawn fire for leveraging his massive platform to spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, and for using racist language. It’s been a wildly successful formula for Rogan, a Newton South High School graduate who dropped out of UMass in the late 1980s to do stand-up. To reach those heights, you also need to revel in conspiracies question climate change chat up ideologues skewer the media and sound hyper-masculine, which seems to particularly enchant Rogan’s zealous, mostly male audience. Listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast have likely heard him rave about the nutritional value of elk - “you’re literally eating a super athlete” - or the full-body benefits of sitting in a room set at 250 degrees below zero.īut idiosyncrasy alone isn’t the reason “The Joe Rogan Experience,” with an estimated 200 million downloads per month, is the world’s most popular podcast.
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