The Trailer for Joe Rogan’s Live Netflix Special Is Only Missing a Supplements Plug

On August 3rd, Joe Rogan will perform his first new stand-up comedy special in six years live on Netflix, and the streamer is now promoting the big get with all the enthusiasm and panache of a Texas Ford dealership hawking pre-owned F-150s.

Rogan’s upcoming show, titled Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats, will be the third such live special produced by Netflix following Chris Rock: Selective Outrage in 2023 and The Roast of Tom Brady earlier this year. The podcasting demagogue previously put out two pre-taped Netflix specials, 2016’s obligatorily titled Triggered and then Strange Times in 2018, but Rogan’s stand-up output dropped off toward the end of Donald Trump’s first term as the price tag on The Joe Rogan Experience grew to nine figures when he moved the world’s most popular podcast to Spotify in 2020.

Then, back in February, Rogan re-upped his Spotify deal for an astounding $250 million, which makes us think that the offer Netflix made to convince Rogan to continue their live comedy experiment must have been outrageously costly to the streamer — so much so that they must have had to gut their marketing department and put out a trailer that looks like it was made with a free-to-use A.I. video generator with the prompt, “Joe Rogan owns the libs to the tune of The Black Keys’ B-sides.”

Now, obviously, any Rogan special is going to have a massive, passionate and viciously loyal audience pre-loaded into the project thanks to JRE. So, if there’s a place to cut corners on Burn the Boats, the YouTube trailer isn’t the worst choice. I mean, at this point in Rogan’s controversial and wildly successful career, no comedy fan on the planet is on the fence about Rogan’s antics and style. Either you listen to Rogan religiously and spend your weekends trying to convince your beer league softball teammates to try Alpha Brain, or you think that the pig-headed and ever malleable politics of JRE and its alt-to-far-right guests are an existential threat to democracy.

As such, I doubt anyone will be swayed one way or another about watching Burn the Boats next month by this embarrassingly amateur trailer that couldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes to slap together. That said, Rogan-lovers and Rogan-haters alike enjoyed trashing the Netflix teaser in the comment section of the video, with one writing, “I don’t get why they put random snippets of dialogue without context in a trailer. Surely there’s a joke or two they could clip to give us a taste of what to expect.”

“Like, wouldn’t they want to include 1 joke in the advertisement?” another commenter complained.

“I can guarantee there are no jokes in this thing,” a third added as many stand-up fans pointed out that the entirety of Rogan’s actual comedy output in the last five years easily could have fit in the 40-second commercial.

Or as one particularly brutal commenter quipped of Netflix, “Next you’ll be giving Brendan Schaub a special.”