No Laughs Since 2009: Joe Rogan Says 'The Hangover' Was the Last Good Comedy

Joe Rogan says that, after The Hangover premiered in 2009, the woke mob put a moratorium on making great comedy movies that continues to this day. So I guess the shitty sequels are two more things Rogan blames on the SJWs.

Over the last decade, the most successful and influential figure in podcasting has made complaining about comedy, a medium in which he once participated, a central part of his platform. Both on The Joe Rogan Experience and in Rogan’s Austin club, Comedy Mothership, which has tighter security and facial recognition software than Langley, the dude-bro demagogue’s massive following expects him to center any discussion about the state of modern humor around anti-woke alarmism by working backwards from the assumption that every issue affecting the comedy community has its roots in ultra-PC liberal thought-policing. To Rogan and his fans, the platitude of, “You can’t joke about anything nowadays” isn’t just accepted as an unimpeachable fact – it’s practically a commandment. 

So, when Joe Rogan went on his show last week and told his guest, fitness YouTuber Derek Munro of More Plates More Dates, that the last great comedy film to come out of Hollywood was Todd Phillips’ smash hit bachelor party comedy The Hangover, Rogan’s reasoning predictably revolved around “cancel culture”  – said Rogan, “You can’t make movies like that anymore – too many people would come after you.” Though, maybe I’m making too great of an assumption in thinking that Rogan knows the movie is fiction – those “people” he’s talking about could just be Ken Jeong’s goons.

The impromptu praise for The Hangover came while Rogan and Munro were discussing South Park. “They’re the only show that Comedy Central leaves alone,” Rogan said of the series, “There’s no way you could make South Park today if you were an unknown group of cartoonists. No chance, they would never let you. It’s too crazy! But it’s the only good show on the network so they let it go.” 

“They’re so important, because they’re one of the few people out there that’s willing to – in this day and age, when you can’t even make comedy movies anymore (sic),” Rogan apparently explained in his praise of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “There’s so few comedy movies being made. You’re never going to see a Tropic Thunder today.”

Rogan identified both The Hangover and Superbad as the last great comedy movies that were “allowed” to be made. It’s not the first time he’s heaped praise on the former, either – last year, during a JRE episode with Tom Papa, Rogan lamented the first installment of the Hangover trilogy as the “last really good comedy movie” before “wokeness killed” them.

Frankly, Rogan’s half right – the mid-budget, R-rated comedy genre that produced the hits he name-dropped in the 2000s has certainly fallen out of favor in Hollywood, but not for the reasons he claims. In fact, mid-budget movies in general have seen a shrinking market share, a trend that’s been widely covered and dissected across the entertainment world. Many factors have been identified in the disappearance of the mid-sized movie, from the domination of the superhero spectacle films to the rise of shoestring streaming movies, but the dumbest possible angle to take is that wokeness is behind the film world financiers’ decision to phase out Hangover-esque features along with the rest of the $35 million movies.

Meanwhile, the rise of the low-budget indie comedy in the last decade spawned beloved hits like What We Do In The Shadows and The Death of Stalin, which, though they lack the the crass simplicity of a butt-naked Jeong blasting Zach Galifianakis in the face with a crowbar, showed that the combination masterful writing and premiere comedy performers can still make memorable movies that stand the test of time.

Also, as the single wealthiest and most influential anti-woke comedian, Rogan is more than capable of getting his own comedy film made, if he ever has the inclination to be the change he wants to see in the movie industry. Rogan’s friends over at The Daily Wire are already aggressively branching out into the right-wing comedy film industry, and there isn’t a single celebrity they’d be more eager to feature on a poster than the king of podcasting himself. 

Maybe the issue isn’t that anti-woke boundary pushers aren’t allowed to make comedy movies anymore. Maybe the problem is that Rogan won’t. Drink on it, Joe.