Great Job, Internet!: Elephant Graveyard takes Comedy Mothership back to Planet Rogan

The cheerfully titled “How Comedy Drowned In A Radioactive Cesspool Of Corruption And Depravity,” which premiered at the unofficial TIFF opening event Midnight Dankness, returns to the inner workings of the Comedy Czar Joe Rogan. A direct follow-up to last year’s viral “How Comedy Was Destroyed By An Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult,” the video returns to Austin to reinforce some of their theories about Rogan and his connections to the world’s wealthiest and most dangerous weirdos, collecting the mealy-mouthed rebuttals from Rogan’s friends, and providing even more links between Rogan’s conspiracy-addled podcast and the bad actors across the table from him. 

“Comedy Drowned” explores comedy’s “pissscape,” which somehow flows on. Despite the growing YouTube subgenre of Rogan Watchers, who dissect every podcast appearance members of the Rogansphere make to explain why the Austin scene is so cooked, Netflix’s continued platforming of the hackiest joke slingers keeps them in the mainstream. Elephant Graveyard doesn’t miss an opportunity to criticize the Big N, which they theorize attached themselves to Austin in an elaborate bid to convince Congress that Netflix was sufficiently not-woke enough to buy Warner Bros. That project was a failure, and all Netflix has to show for it is a Tony Hinchcliffe special it actually paid money for. 

But perhaps the most interesting part of Elephant Graveyard’s recent survey is Carlos Mencia. We like to forget, but Joe Rogan only became the Comedy Czar after he won some artistic credibility by calling out Mencia for stealing jokes. At the time, Rogan’s defense of comedic originality signaled to the wider public that, while not funny, Rogan had integrity. But like Rogan’s relationship to Peter Thiel, the podcaster’s Mencia vendetta had more to do with penetrating the “walled garden” of The Comedy Store, a running theme in his life. Gaining access to these spaces would set about a cataclysmic series of events that begets the second Trump presidency and a higher body count than any other host in Fear Factor history.