For Joe Rogan, the last week has been almost identical to the final seven days of intense training experienced by the fighters he’ll be talking about on Saturday night at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. But Rogan’s work hasn’t been done in a gym, and his arena won’t be the Octagon.
Instead, the UFC’s color commentator has been woodshedding at clubs in Colorado (and Wednesday night in Columbus at the Funny Bone comedy club), dotting all his I’s and crossing his T’s before he hits the stage Thursday night for two shows at the Southern Theatre that are being filmed for a Spike TV special.
And like the fighters of the UFC, he’s only got one night to get it right.
“It’s definitely more pressure, but as long as you’re prepared, it’s just another day in the office,” said Rogan, who will be filming his show for television for the first time since a 2007 Showtime special “Joe Rogan Live”. “If I wasn’t prepared for it, I would definitely feel it more, but it’s just a matter of knowing what you’re going to do before you go out there. When you’re under pressure in comedy, you can’t allow yourself to have negative thoughts when you go on stage. It’s kinda like a little balancing act in your mind – even though you’re under pressure, it all has to be fun for you too. If it’s not fun for you, it’s not gonna be fun for the audience, and people can sense that. They know when you’re actually having a good time and when you’re forcing it. When you’re forcing it, they’re not gonna laugh. But that’s the risk that you run with high-pressure shows.”
If anything, Rogan appears to be comfortable in the eye of the storm. The fact that he’s in his third decade as a standup comic helps, but even more importantly, Rogan owes his calm to pre-show preparation and a knowledge of the medium he’s going to be performing in.
“There’s a little more preparation, a little more thinking about it, instead of a regular show where I can just wing it,” said Rogan of his work to get ready for the filming of a television special. “I’ve got to think about time constraints – it has to all be done in an hour, which turns out to be 47 minutes with commercials and everything – so I have to streamline and edit things a little bit more, and think about it more.”
But what about some of Rogan’s classic bits, which – to put it carefully – aren’t exactly built for basic cable television, and his tendency to feed off what is going on in the crowd on a particular night? Well, first off, his show will air after 10pm on Spike, when he has been assured the content will be more adult-oriented. As for his gift of making each show unique based on the audience and his location, there are no worries there either.
“You can definitely go off on it because you can always edit things out – the beautiful thing is the editing,” he said. “So as long as I’m having a good time, I’m gonna do that naturally. There’s always something that I’m gonna start talking about naturally, and as long as we have the power to edit things, it should be no big deal.”
And to Rogan, the key part of the whole lead-up to the show is simply getting up on stage and working out new material in front of a live, and sometimes unforgiving, audience.
“The more shows you do, you get real loose and you get in what’s called ‘comedy shape,’” he said. “Comedy’s one of those weird things – the more you do it, the better you get at it.”
Nearly 21 years after he first stepped on stage on August 27, 1988, it’s safe to say that Rogan has paid his dues and perfected his craft. Forget his stints on “Newsradio” and “Fear Factor” – if you want to see the New Jersey native in his element, it’s as a standup comic. And once he gets talking about the art of comedy, it’s clear that this isn’t just some guy who can tell some funny stories; Rogan takes what he does on stage very seriously, and it’s a constant learning process for him as well.
“It (comedy) is like anything else,” he explains. “It’s not something that you do immediately. When you first do it, you’re not gonna be good at it. It takes a while, and it’s a strange art form that you have to master. And the weirdest thing about the art form of standup comedy is that nobody can really teach you how to do it. There are certain principles that you can follow, ideas you can follow, but the bottom line is that everybody’s ‘funny’ is different. Your sense of humor would be different from my sense of humor, which would be different from somebody else’s. Steven Wright and Chris Rock are both standup comedians and both really funny guys, but they’re both incredibly different. Mitch Hedberg is different from Sam Kinison. And there are similarities in the way jokes are structured and the things that are funny about them, but the bottom line is, it’s all comedy, and nobody’s comedy is the same – it’s all different, so nobody could really tell you how to do it. It’s something you have to experience. You have to go on stage, you have to bomb, you have to have bad sets, you have to have good sets, you have to remember things that you said that made people laugh and write them down and figure out how to translate them to the stage – it’s all those things. Comedy’s like this intangible language that you have to slowly learn.”
So both behind closed doors and in his travels around the world, Rogan is always observing, always taking notes in his head and always wondering how world affairs, pop culture, or everyday life can be made into something that will make someone laugh. Frankly, that’s hard work.
“You’ve got to constantly expand your experiences and your viewpoint,” he said. “You have to have a lot of life experiences so you have things to draw on, otherwise you’re gonna run out of material, and if you run out of material, people aren’t gonna enjoy coming back to see you if you’re doing the same thing year after year.”
Rogan’s not about to let his act go stale, and if you’re in Columbus this week (after his Wednesday and Thursday gigs, he will finish up the week with two shows on Friday, March 6th at the Funny Bone in Columbus), you’ll find that out first hand.
“I just want everybody to have a good time – that’s what comedy is all about,” he said. “The whole purpose of comedy is to make people laugh, to let people have a good time, and I’m incredibly blessed and honored to be able to do something like that. I think it’s the coolest job on the planet, and I just feel very, very fortunate that that’s what I do for a living. There’s something magical about that, something incredible about the idea of making a living by making people laugh. I couldn’t imagine that I would be happy doing anything else as much as I’m happy doing comedy.”
Rogan appears at The Southern Theatre in Columbus, Ohio on March 5. Show times are 7:00 & 10:00 PM and tickets are on sale now at all Ticketmaster outlets. Fans can read Joe’s daily blog detailing his preparations leading up to the performances at www.JoeRogan.net.
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