At around the 40-minute mark in Burn the Boats, Joe Rogan’s new Netflix comedy special (his first in six years), the world’s most popular—and controversial—podcaster says, “If your vaccine advice is coming from me, you’re in trouble. I am a professional shit-talker. Some things are gonna be true and some things are gonna be shit-talking, part of the fun’s figuring out which is which. The best advice I can give you is don’t come to me for advice!”

This is one of the few times in the special where Rogan shows a modicum of self-awareness. In a similar, self-deprecatory vein soon after, Rogan concedes that it would be pretty funny if he were to actually die of COVID-19. “The memes would never stop!” he shrieks as the crowd laps it up.

These two moments stand out on Burn The Boats because they hint at the possibility of introspection, at the idea that Rogan is more complicated and multi-dimensional than the conspiracy-loving, slur-dropping caricature he’s often characterised as by his critics. But they also stand out because that inward-looking insight is so completely absent on the rest of the hour-long special.

Far too much of Burn The Boats can be summed up with two simple words: tired and tiring. Rogan sticks to his usual ‘hey, I’m just an old school guy asking questions’ shtick, aiming his shit-stirring ‘curiosity’ at familiar targets: women, gay and trans people, college students, Democrats, and pretty much anybody with a pulse who ever questioned or criticised him. Worse, Rogan does this in a relentlessly screechy voice that sounds like Gilbert Gottfried on cocaine, an angry red vein throbbing on his forehead throughout.

For the first ten minutes of the show, Rogan is in ‘anticipatory rebuttal’ mode, as though he is addressing not the audience but a strawman critic. Yes, his podcast includes ‘misinformation’ every now and then. So what? Yes, he got fired from Fear Factor after asking the contestants to drink donkey semen, helpfully procured with the help of a ‘cattle prod’ (for your own peace of mind, I suggest you do not Google “Hannibal cattle prod”). So what?

My fans love me, Rogan says, and who cares about the rest? Fair play, I guess. But if you’re claiming to be a simpleton, it’s hypocritical to “well, actually” every single piece of criticism that comes your way—you either buy into the tyranny of facts and reason or you don’t. Can’t have it both ways, Joe!

At the 22-minute mark, you face the obligatory barrage of transphobic jokes. If Dave Chappelle’s Netflix work has shown us anything, it’s how mainstream transphobia has become in recent years. Rogan duly jumps onto the bandwagon, with a disclaimer: he “believes in trans people” (whatever that means) but also thinks that at least some of them “are crazy people”. As if stating that the earth goes around the sun, he then asks, surely some men who put on dresses are lunatics?

“I’m sorry if it’s taken me a while to adjust,” Rogan says. “All my life if there was a movie about a killer, he was way crazier if he wore a dress. Psycho, he dresses like his mom and stabs ladies in the shower. Silence of the Lambs, it puts the lotion in the basket. Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf was dressed like a fucking lady! I’m not prejudiced!”

This is such a classic case of almost getting it. A better, smarter comedian would have taken the exact same material and used it to observe that Hollywood has had a major role to play in shaping people’s opinions, especially on red-button issues like this one. There have been reams of critical material written about the transphobia of 90s hits like Silence of the Lambs or Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura. A smarter comedian would then have strategically used the ‘I’m just a dumb jock’ shtick to call out the hypocrisy of transphobes—if the self-confessed dumb guy can get it (this hypothetical comedian would ask), why can’t JK Rowling or Chimamanda Adichie?

Rogan plays it safe and boring and coddles his core right-wing audience all the way through to the end.

Instead, Rogan plays it safe and boring and coddles his core right-wing audience all the way through to the end. There’s even the entirely predictable rant where he directly confronts (gasp) the wokeness of America, with all the condescension and self-assuredness of a middle-aged uncle with a master’s degree in WhatsApp University brain-rot.

“I get why the young people want to be woke, I really do. The old people fucked up the world, so let’s try communism. I get it. You don’t know any better, I get it, you’re young. I get it. And also, people desperately want to be on a team. We’re tribal, and there’s only two teams in this country. There’s the left and the right. You know, you don’t want to be independent.”

This is the kind of passage that felt outdated even as I was listening to it live. Like Rogan had somehow turned the clock back by the mere fact of uttering these words. What Rogan actually wants is to thread an impossible needle: he wants to be seen as the sort-of progressive, kind-of empathetic ‘just asking questions’ guy, even as he continues to bring the looniest, most authoritarian, anti-science, anti-feminist views into the mainstream. As Burn the Boats shows, however, this requires far greater skill than Rogan has ever been able to summon.