Joe Rogan’s Live Comedy Special Lets Netflix Have It Both Ways

The announcement, last month, of Joe Rogan’s live Netflix special felt strangely inevitable. Airing on Aug. 3 at 10pm ET, Joe Rogan: Burn Your Boats will be the first stand-up special in six years from the comedian who is now best known for his rambling interview podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Massively popular, chronically controversial, and adored by a huge audience that has remained loyal even as he drew criticism for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and using racial slurs, Rogan is just the kind of voice Netflix loves to elevate. And its decision to stream his set in real time illustrates why Netflix is going all-in on live comedy—a gimmick that offers an ideal mix of appointment-viewing intrigue and, for a platform that has faced scrutiny for the content of its stand-up specials, plausible deniability.

As subscribers have surely noticed, Netflix has been making a big push into live programming. “We believe that live, eventized cultural moments… will be a real value add for existing and future members,” the company told shareholders in this year’s first quarterly report. Its Q2 letter emphasized the success of The Roast of Tom Brady, which aired live from L.A.’s Netflix Is a Joke Fest in May and attracted a 22.6 million viewers according to Netflix, making it the platform's most-watched live broadcast ever. (In linear-TV terms, it wasn't exactly the Super Bowl, which attracted about 124 million viewers in 2024. The roast did, however, edge out this year's Oscars, watched live by an audience of just 19.5 million.) According to Netflix, the roast “showed the power of eventized programming—and Netflix’s ability to deliver these big, buzzy live moments for our members.” The letter noted the potential of Rogan’s special, along with upcoming live broadcasts, including a Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match in November and a pair of Christmas Day NFL games, to build on the momentum generated by the Brady roast. On his entertainment-industry podcast The Town, Puck’s Matt Belloni called Netflix’s live slate for the second half of 2024 “a carnival freakshow,” with the platform “really going lowbrow for some of these ad dollars” generated by subscribers to its newish, cheaper, ad-supported tier.

The live-programming pivot might seem counterintuitive, given that it was Netflix that pioneered the binge model of TV consumption. But, more than a decade after the service started making original content, it makes as much sense as any other strategy. Streaming is, after all, in the midst of a chaos era marked by companies’ dramatic departures from conventional wisdom about how to build a sustainable subscription business—including the assumption that people would rather pay a premium fee than watch ads. And one of few advantages many of its competitors have over Netflix is their live sports or news coverage. Sure, Netflix can capitalize on the Olympics with a Simone Biles docuseries. It can run Burn Your Boats as live counter-programming. But it probably can’t hold fans’ attention for the same amount of time they are likely to spend watching gymnastics (among other sports) on Peacock, NBC, and other NBCUniversal networks during the Paris Games.

As Netflix dabbles in expensive licensing deals with everyone from the NFL to the WWE, comedy has, as Fast Company recently noted, become a relatively affordable, low-stakes “warm-up for live sports”—proof of execution the platform surely needs after the high-profile failure of a live Love Is Blind reunion in 2023. This year’s Netflix Is a Joke Fest was an effective reset for the strategy, offering the platform’s most prolific, smoothly executed, slate of live programming to date, including the delightful six-episode talk show John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. and Katt Williams’ stand-up special Woke Foke along with The Roast of Tom Brady. What each of these events shared was at least one big name (the roast featured Ben Affleck, Kim Kardashian, and host Kevin Hart, while Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and Sarah Silverman appeared on Mulaney’s show) and an opportunity to catch exciting, unscripted or at least uncensored moments.

It’s a model Netflix pioneered with its first live stand-up special, 2023’s Chris Rock: Selective Outrage—a big hit that catered to viewers eager to see the A-list comic address one of the most shocking moments in live-TV history: the Oscars telecast where Will Smith slapped Rock, onstage, for making fun of Jada Pinkett-Smith. Some of the Netflix Is a Joke broadcasts delivered on similar expectations of real-time messiness. Nikki Glaser’s deft, vicious set at the Brady roast (“It’s hard to walk away from something that’s not your pregnant girlfriend”) went viral, and for good reason, even though most of the event’s three-hour runtime was devoted to drunk dudes cracking variations on the same dumb joke (people like to call Brady gay). 

But Williams’ special felt like a bait-and-switch. Like Selective Outrage, Joe Rogan’s 2016 Netflix special Triggered, and so many other titles in this age of edgelord comedy, Woke Foke was packaged as a send-up of liberal pieties. It wasn’t, unless you consider the opinions that America is great, racists are stupid, and Ron DeSantis is crazy to be politically incorrect. Nor did Williams deliver on the reasonable expectation that he’d have more truth bombs to drop, after a filter-free interview on the podcast Club Shay Shay, in January, whose brutal honesty about rivals like Hart, Steve Harvey, and Cedric the Entertainer broke the internet. “Everyone knows I’ll tell,” Williams boasted at the beginning of Woke Foke. But he didn’t, not really.

Of course, for a platform looking to attract as many drama-loving eyeballs as possible, the beauty of making people watch live is that you can dangle bombshells that will never detonate, without having to worry about reviews or word of mouth deflating anticipation. Will Rogan’s much-anticipated special turn out to be as tame as Williams’ was? It’s possible. But it seems more likely that Netflix is going live with Rogan for a savvier reason; I think the company wants to have its naughty, what-will-he-say-next star comic and deflect responsibility for any jokes that cross a line, too. What better way to do that than to simply air his performance as it’s happening, so that, for example, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos can credibly claim that he first heard an offensive Rogan joke at the same time as whoever is complaining about it on social media?

Comedy has proven to be a double-edged sword for Netflix. The platform benefits from the combination of low cost, popularity, and cultural relevance that stand-up provides. But it has also faced some very embarrassing—not to mention potentially costly—pushback to comedy that takes aim at vulnerable communities. The backlash against Dave Chappelle’s 2021 special The Closer, a traditional taped set that fixates on Chappelle’s antagonism of the trans community, included not just LGBTQ organizations, but also Netflix staff, who staged a walkout. Sarandos’ invocation of Hannah Gadsby—the queer, nonbinary comic whose breakthrough Netflix special Nanette questioned the morality of stand-up—as proof that the company also supports LGBTQ comedians backfired spectacularly. “You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted,” Gadsby shot back via Instagram. “F-ck you and your amoral algorithm cult.” (In a sign of Netflix’s monolithic influence in comedy, Gadsby continues to work with the platform.) And an employee was fired for leaking “commercially sensitive information” about The Closer to the media—information that presumably would not have been available to them had the special premiered live.

With that debacle behind it, you can imagine why Netflix might have wanted to release Chappelle’s next proper stand-up special, The Dreamer, this past New Year’s Eve—traditionally a big night for live TV, but one when both headline-seeking entertainment reporters and the young lefties who are among Chappelle’s most vocal detractors were likely to be away from their screens. It had dropped the similarly outrage-baiting comedian Ricky Gervais’ Armageddon—the follow-up to 2022’s SuperNature, another special called out for transphobic jokes—less than a week earlier, on a day when it was even less liable to draw criticism: Christmas. Fans knew it was coming, in part, because Netflix promoted it with a teaser that featured an ableist slur, which Gervais later framed as giving voice to “an idiot who would say that,” that caused predictable controversy. (Last year also brought pre-recorded Netflix specials from rising shock comics Matt Rife and Shane Gillis, though Rife's Natural Selection was a bit of a surprise hit and Gillis' Beautiful Dogs was relatively tame, in keeping with his practice of saving the racial slurs and caricatures for his paywalled podcasts. But it's worth noting that Netflix didn't announce its acquisition of Gillis' scripted comedy series Tires until just after he'd proved his mainstream palatability in an SNL hosting gig.)

A live Joe Rogan special takes this strategy of avoiding accountability further. Netflix isn’t just dodging advance criticism of Burn Your Boats; it’s also ducking responsibility for anything Rogan says during the broadcast that might make subscribers (or its own employees) mad. And when it comes to critics of its often-reactionary taste within the comedy world, the knowledge that “woke” comedians like Gadsby stuck with the company through the Chappelle affair suggests that Netflix has so thoroughly consolidated its power in the medium, there’s little reason to believe dissenters would jump ship over an offensive live special. The same might well be true of subscribers, especially the ones who love stand-up, who may not love every voice Netflix is platforming, but who have come to see the service as a necessary evil—no different, or less ethically fraught, from an Amazon Prime membership or a DoorDash habit.

Taken together with the mandate to build the platform’s live-event business—as well as a crucial invulnerability to both the FCC fines and the in-house standards and practices censors that limit what can be said on a controversy-chasing live broadcast comedy series like SNL—the likely result of Burn Your Boats is a diabolically savvy, win-win publicity stunt that can be replicated again and again, critics be damned. By the time the backlash to Rogan’s special arrives, Netflix will already have gotten away with it.