Joe Rogan Told Tony Hinchcliffe to Cut Puerto Rico Joke: ‘That’s Gonna Get You Stabbed’

To be clear, Joe Rogan thinks Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being “a floating island of garbage” is solid. He just believed saying it out loud would eventually result in physical violence. 

“I’ve gotta tell you, that joke kills at comedy clubs. I don’t like the joke, (but) it kills,” Rogan said this week on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “It’s just like, if you’re Puerto Rican and you hear that in the audience, you’re like (feigns a groaning sound). But it’s a funny joke. The joke does well. But I said to him, I go, ‘Dude, that’s the one that’s gonna get you stabbed.’ And he used to talk about it on stage, saying, ‘Joe Rogan always says that’s the one that’s gonna get me stabbed.'”

Was Rogan a prophet? Yet to be determined. But one could argue that Hinchcliffe has suffered multiple metaphorical wounds after telling the joke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend. Everyone from fellow comedians to Aubrey Plaza to Ann Coulter has given Hinchcliffe virtual kicks in the crotch. Even Trump has distanced himself from Hinchcliffe, claiming he’s never heard of the comic.

Why didn’t Hinchcliffe go to Uncle Joe for advice before delivering his disastrous set? Rogan could have told him political rallies are “a bad environment for comedy” — this ain’t the Mothership, bro! “I tell all comedians, ‘Don’t ever do comedy at something that’s not a comedy event.’ Is it going to have a bunch of speakers, and you’re going to go up and do 10 minutes? Don’t ever do that. It’s a terrible setup. And it’s a political rally, and you’re doing jokes like you’re in a comedy club. Don’t do it!”

“I didn’t know what bits he was going to do,” Rogan said. “But then I heard he did that joke, and I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, Tony. Here it comes.’” 

Did Hinchcliffe’s career suffer a fatal stabbing? It’s likely only a flesh wound, said Rogan. “I think it’ll blow over, just like all these things do,” he predicted. “There’s people that are always going to hate someone like Tony, and it’s going to make other people love him more. It’s just like, he’s going through it right now. He’s going through the storm.”

Then Rogan played the ultimate comedian self-defense card — it was only a joke!  He called out politicians like Barack Obama for quoting the “punchline” as if it were a statement. That’s “really fucked up,” Rogan contended. “You know that’s a joke. That’s like going to a Quentin Tarantino movie … ‘And then the man killed that woman.’ Like, he didn’t really kill that woman. This is a movie.”

Sure, it’s exactly like that.

Even Rogan knows better. If Hinchcliffe had asked for his counsel before the rally, Rogan says he’d have set him straight: “Don’t you fucking dare do that joke.”