Patton Oswalt Likens His Relationship With Joe Rogan To Knowing L. Ron Hubbard Pre-Scientology
Imagine if one of your casual acquaintances from your 20s started a cult that quickly threatened to take over the entire country – Patton Oswalt and Harlan Ellison don't have to.It may surprise casual observers of Joe Rogan’s career to learn that, long before he was palling around with the President and the richest man in the world while pushing far-right conspiracy theories about immigrants and COVID-19, the Joe Rogan Experience host was a comedian who tried – and, occasionally succeeded – to make people laugh. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, most average Americans who recognized Rogan knew him through his stand-up, or his time on the cult-hit sitcom NewsRadio, or, later, as the host of the competition show Fear Factor.Today, Rogan commands a massive, unprecedented platform that may very well have the power to sway presidential elections. Through JRE, Rogan is the single most politically influential figure in the entertainment industry – which, to be fair, may only be true because L. Ron Hubbard has been dead (allegedly) since 1986.
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As a fellow 1990s comedy up-and-comer, Oswalt has known Rogan throughout the latter's transformation from TV and stand-up star to alt-right thought leader. In a recent appearance on Jay Mohr's podcast Mohr Stories, Oswalt described his experience as Rogan's colleague for the last several decades with an anecdote about a science fiction author who watched a little-known pulp writer start a religion that still threatens to take over the cosmos.
During the podcast, Mohr asked Oswalt how he felt when he made his first and last appearance on JRE back in May, 2020, which, coincidentally occurred shortly before Rogan's infamous Ivermectin phase.
“Look, I knew Joe back in the Nineties, and he's a perfectly nice guy,” Oswalt explained before telling a story that illustrates what it's like to watch someone you know become supreme ruler of the universe – or, in Oswalt's case, the Manosphere. “You wanna hear a really tortured analogy?” Oswalt asked, “I was friends with a writer named Harlan Ellison, sci-fi writer, and when he was young, he was friends with L. Ron Hubbard when L. Ron Hubbard was just a pulp writer.”“He was like, ‘He was perfectly fine, some of his stuff sucked, some of it was good!’” Oswalt recalled of what Ellison told him about the founder of the Church of Scientology, who was also Ellison's neighbor when they both lived in Times Square during the early 1960s. Oswalt even recounted a hilariously on-brand anecdote about Hubbard from Ellison, quoting his sci-fi friend as saying, “Hubbard could take – he would gobble a bottle of amphetamines and write a novel in a night.”Oswalt remembered Ellison telling him, “(Hubbard) was perfectly okay, and, now, I live in a world where that guy, my hallmate, controls a zombie army that will do whatever he wants and will destroy people … How is this the world I'm living in??”
“I have a similar thing where, I knew Joe in the Nineties, (he was) a perfectly fine comedian, perfectly fine, and, now, I live in a world where this guy can influence elections, he can affect the economy, he can affect the pandemic response,” Oswalt said of his own Ellison-esque experience of witnessing Rogan's rise to power first-hand.
As for how he feels about Rogan's unprecedented political influence, Oswalt cracked, “Joe's a perfectly nice guy, (but) I can think of a dozen other road comics who I'd rather have that power!”“We're living in a very strange world right now … where, if you have enough of a platform, the media goes, ‘Well, he must be onto something if he has ten million listeners,’” Oswalt reflected of Rogan's success, “You reverse engineer expertise.” When Mohr pressed his guest to name a comic whom he'd rather have in direct contact with the White House in Rogan's place, Mohr and Oswalt were in agreement about one name – Michael McKean. “I would love if Michael McKean were running things, are you kidding?” Oswalt said of McKean becoming the next Rogan/Hubbard, “Oh my God, that would solve so many problems!”He's going to eat those worlds when McKean launches his movement in Spinal Tap 3: The Amplification of Galactic Dynasty.
