Recently, comedian Dave Anthony of The Dollop podcast shared a weird behind-the-scenes story. The production team wanted to cast Rogan as an athletic guy helping get Marc Maron in shape, but what happened next exposed something peculiar about Rogan.
According to Anthony, the show’s two showrunners approached the casting carefully, knowing Rogan was “kind of big.” They meticulously researched him, combing through old interviews and magazine pieces.
Then they did something clever: they took actual quotes—things Rogan had genuinely said in interviews—and incorporated them into the script as dialogue representing his character’s beliefs.
When Maron sent Rogan the script, the response was controversial. Rogan called Maron furious, demanding to know why they were making him “look like such a idiot.” The punchline? Everything objectionable in the script came directly from Rogan’s own words. As Anthony put it,
“Joe Rogan doesn’t know what he’s saying most of the time and just babbles. And so when he sees it written, he’s like, ‘Man, this guy sounds like a moron.’ That stuff you said.”
Rogan’s had some problematic takes over the years, including his misinterpretation of climate data where he failed to grasp that changes shown over 485 million years occur over tens of thousands of years, not the unprecedented rapid spike of the last 200 years.
Marc Maron himself has been increasingly critical of Rogan’s influence on comedy and culture, suggesting Rogan has “tribalized” comedy and created “an army of people that think they know comedy, but they only know a specific thing.” Maron argues that the “anti-woke” comedy movement Rogan champions has real-world consequences, emboldening policies that harm vulnerable communities.
