Joe Rogan Is Too Big to Cancel

He’s now one of the most consumed media products on the planet. His Spotify deal, estimated at $100 million, speaks to the allure of making audiences feel they’re in on something subversive.

The other comics called him “Little Ball of Anger” — semi-affectionately, never to his face — a man flammable by bearing and branding, it seemed, with his taekwondo muscles and a scorching conviction that the Bible had some holes. “Noah was 600 years old and a drunk!” Joe Rogan told his Los Angeles crowds some two decades back, in one favored bit about the implausibility of the scriptural ark. Then he’d spar afterward with a waitress who was raised Catholic — and mindful of divine wrath. “Stand back,” Eleanor Kerrigan, the Comedy Store waitress who became a comedian herself, would say to Mr. Rogan, blessing herself as he left the stage. “You’re going to burst into flames.”