Stand-up comedy, mixed martial arts, fatherhood keep Joe Rogan busy
Being surrounded by women at home is the best thing that could happen to a guy like Joe Rogan.
“It balances me out,” Rogan, 44, says of living with three daughters and his wife. “If I had a house full of boys, with the things I like to do, I’d probably become a barbarian.”
He’s exaggerating, sort of. But Rogan, who is scheduled to perform his stand-up comedy act at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay on Friday, is the very definition of macho. Macho and busy.
He hosts NBC’s “Fear Factor,” does color commentary for the UFC, performs stand-up and hosts a popular podcast. Most recently, he got into the supplement and vitamin business with the launch of his company, Onnit.com.
But Rogan also is an expert martial artist. He holds a black belt in taekwondo and a brown belt in jiujitsu. He practices kickboxing and, judging from the way he looks shirtless, works out like a fiend. Rogan possesses a level of muscularity and definition that rivals that of a professional fighter. Recently, he put that exceptional physique on display in a workout feature in Men’s Fitness.
Testosterone practically oozes out of the telephone as he talks about how his interests and pursuits, as unrelated as they sound, really are related.
“Martial arts is very much like stand-up in that there’s no BS-ing,” Rogan explains. He has studied martial arts since he was a kid. “You have to be 100 percent aware of your skill set. That’s the same way with comedy. You can’t think ‘I’m hilarious’ and then the audience just doesn’t see it.”
Rogan, who had his big Hollywood break in the 1990s on the sitcom “News Radio,” has been covering mixed martial arts since 1997. He’s been doing stand-up comedy for more than 20 years.
Humor, he says, is everywhere, even in the most serious situations.
“Life is ridiculous. The world we live in is absolutely silly,” he says. “There’s always something going on” that can provide inspiration for material.
His style of comedy doesn’t appeal to everyone. Rogan is a pull-no-punches kind of guy, so if you’re easily offended, Rogan says, stay home. Otherwise, expect to hear Rogan’s take on politics, family, life, drugs, martial arts, fighting — pretty much everything.
He has jokes about some heady stuff: time travel, black holes, even the God particle. Then he has the less heady but much more personal material on fatherhood.
“Having children changed me a lot. That gives you a lot of insight into things. It’s one of the most profound things that has happened to me, by far,” Rogan says. “But it’s very much like doing mushrooms: If you haven’t done them you don’t know what it’s like.”
It’s life-altering when you have someone in your life that you actually love more than you love yourself, he says, as cliche as that sounds. It took a couple of bananas for that to sink in.
Recently, there were two bananas in his house. One was brown and bordering on rotten, while the other was a perfect, ripe yellow specimen. His 3-year-old loves bananas. Rogan gave her the best piece of fruit.
“I was eating a (expletive) banana. This was the only person in the world I would make this decision for. I realized, ‘Wow, I love her more than I like me,’ ” Rogan says of his daughter. “If it would have been just me and my wife, I would think, ‘Oh, that bitch is getting a (expletive) banana.’ “
Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at spadgett@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564. Follow @StripSonya on Twitter.