You Think You're So Heterodox

Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other "free thinkers" who happen to all think alike.

- Helen Lewis

It's a Tuesday night in downtown Austin, and Joe Rogan is pretending to jerk off right in front of my face. The strangest thing about this situation is that millions of straight American men would kill to switch places with me.

Centimillionaires generally pride themselves on their inaccessibility, but most weeks you can see Rogan live at the Comedy Mothership, which he owns, in exchange for $50 and a two-drink minimum.

About 250 tickets for each "Joe Rogan and Friends" show go on sale every Sunday at 2 p.m. central time, and disappear within seconds. When you arrive at the Mothership, the staff locks your phone in a bag, which both ensures that you cannot leak footage online and makes you think you're about to see some really forbidden shit.

You are not. What you will see is four comedians, plus Rogan himself, with routines that might shock the Amish, the over-80 set, college students, Vox staffers, or John Oliver superfans-but not anyone who, say, went to a comedy club in the 1990s.

Of the many recent failures of the American left, one of the greatest is making entry-level battle-of-the-sexes humor seem avant-garde.

(Did you know that women often run relationship decisions past their female friends? Bitches be crazy! That sort of thing.) As Rogan himself says after he emerges in stonewashed jeans, clutching a glass of something amber on ice: "Fox News called this an antiwoke comedy club.

That's just a comedy club!" To underline the point that these jokes can survive outside the safe space of the Mothership, much of the material I saw Rogan perform ended up in his latest Netflix special, which was released in August.