Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2361 - Graham Linehan
Uploaded: 2025-08-06T17:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2361 - Graham Linehan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2361 - Graham Linehan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2361 - Graham Linehan

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Yeah.
So you're telling me about the scar you got on your forehead recently.
Yeah, I got into a bar fight with some, some guys were insulting a woman.
Yeah, to take care of business, right?
Had to take care of a bit of business.
No, I fell off a scooter.
I fell off a scooter.
I was riding around Scottsdale.
Feeling great and free because I'd never ridden a scooter before because I
always thought
that we call them scooter nonsense in the UK.
And because there was no one around to see me, I just thought, oh, this is
great.
I could do this all the time.
But I just immediately fell flat in my face.
Did you hit something or did you fall?
No, I saw what looked like a ramp, but it was a single step down.
So I went flying through the air.
And I remember when I landed, there was a weird moment when I landed where I
thought, oh,
that wasn't so bad.
I didn't, I didn't screw myself up too badly.
But then there was a second crunch.
And I remember thinking, oh, I'm dead.
What was the second crunch?
I don't know.
Some, somehow I fell.
Double.
So you double fell.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, I kind of like it because it makes me, it makes me look how I
feel internally.
Busted up and changed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So would it break your nose?
No, oh, I did break my nose.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, but, you know, it's one of those things.
Again, as I say, I quite like it.
I think it gives me some courage.
It doesn't mess you up.
Yeah.
You're fine.
Yeah.
You know, it's just a thing.
And I might stick with the story about the bar, you know.
I think you already gave up the goods.
The problem with a story like that is I'm always like, is that better to get
the fuck
beaten out of you by guys?
Like, maybe it's better to fall down.
It's different if you're a fighter.
I would imagine you wouldn't be too happy about it.
Yeah, I'd be very upset that I got my ass kicked.
Yeah, yeah.
Although that's happened many times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The broken nose is a problem.
Did you get your septum fixed and make sure that it's not all clogged up?
I didn't.
I didn't.
You should.
I know, yeah.
I'll get on that.
That is the one that I tell fighters whenever they retire, I'm like, please get
your nose
fixed.
It'll change the quality of your life so much.
Okay.
Because if you can't breathe out of your nose, you're missing out on a large
percentage of
cardio.
Right.
And not just cardio like for athletics, but just everyday life.
Like, you're not breathing out of your nose.
You're not getting enough oxygen.
Sure.
Like, you're probably oxygen depleted.
And then you become one of them mouth open dudes.
You did a whole interview with a guy who does that, doesn't he?
He kind of teaches himself to only breathe through his nose.
James Nestor.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
He's got a great book called Breathe.
For anybody who's fascinated by breathing techniques and how much it can help
you, you
can do a lot with breathing.
It's just a thing that no one does.
Because it's like, oh, I'll look into that.
And then you put it off.
It never happens.
Absolutely.
And I've got to be careful because that's how old age gets you.
It doesn't get you in one go.
You don't suddenly become this bent old man.
It picks away at you.
Things like falling off scooters and, you know what I mean?
Not getting it fixed.
Things like that are what pick away at you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to be ahead of it.
Yeah.
You got to be vigilant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stay off the heroin, too.
I hear that's bad for you.
I used to get old.
You don't see a lot of old heroin addicts.
No.
There's a punk poet in the UK named John Cooper Clark, who is a bit of a genius.
And he was taking it recreationally for years.
And he only gave it up because he said so many people were worried about me.
I just couldn't deal with it.
They were just worried about me.
But he was one of these guys, I guess like Burroughs, William Burroughs, that
he was able
to just, you know, implement it in his life.
Well, I worked out with a guy who was a longshoreman.
And he had this guy that he worked with that would shoot heroin at lunch every
day.
Wow.
And he was fine.
He worked fine on the job.
He was totally functional.
He would take his hour lunch break.
He would go sit in his truck.
He'd get a bag from some guy.
And then he'd sit in his truck and shoot up.
Wow.
Yeah, like real heroin, like shooting heroin.
What was his job?
He was a longshoreman.
Oh, right.
Wow.
So he worked on the docks.
Holy cow.
You'd think you'd have to have your wits about you.
Well, some of those longs, they did different jobs.
Like my buddy was a fish filet-er for a long time.
So what would happen is you would get these huge trucks filled with fish.
And they would just filet fish all day long.
And he was a boxing trainer.
And so he would rub like Vaseline on your face before you sparred.
You just smelled fish.
Because he just smelled like fish all the time.
He couldn't get it off of him.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just a part of his odor forever.
Right, right.
I mean, cut like thousands of fish a day probably.
That's like the old dye pits I read in Toronto in the job that you didn't want
was to work in the dye pits.
Because guys, what they'd have to do is they'd have to get into these like
human-sized pits filled with dye and wrestle the dye into material.
I'm not sure which material it was.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
So your whole body would be covered in dye?
You would look like the blue man group, you know, except from the neck down,
you know.
And you would always smell of it.
And when you took a shower, I read this in a brilliant book called The Skin of
a Lion by Michael Ondaatje.
So it never comes off?
No, it does.
What they do is they come in a shower and then in one piece the whole paint
just falls on the ground like a skin.
But they never got rid of the smell, you know.
And probably the inside of your bathroom looks like shit forever.
Yeah.
It's like dripping ink.
No, that all happens at work.
That all happens at work.
Oh, they do it at work in a shower?
Yeah.
This is in the old days, you know, way way longer.
How bad must that be for you?
I know, yeah.
Because your skin is an organ.
Yeah.
So you're making your organ doused in a chemical all day long.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, these are the jobs we used to have, you know.
Like what's that thing they say?
Hard times make...
Hard people.
Yeah.
Hard people make soft times.
And we're certainly in the soft times now.
Yeah, we're in soft times make hard people.
Oh, there we go.
Or probably make hard times rather.
Soft people make hard times.
So this is these folks working in it.
Yeah, but this would be the new version.
I think in the old days, in Toronto anyway, they used to get into the pits.
God.
You know?
So, yeah.
Yeah, man.
There's jobs out there that fucking suck.
I was watching this video today where this young lady was complaining about her
job and
that it just consumes her entire life and she doesn't want to do it anymore.
And then like people were complaining in the comments that she's lazy.
I'm like, no, like she hates her job.
It's entirely reasonable.
It's a little kind of crazy that everybody wants to declare to the whole world
what their
personal issues are about their...
I mean, social media has made it very weird that all these people just get
attention for
something that you essentially used to just talk about with friends.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's part of the problem, isn't it?
I mean, every time we make these statements, we make it to a public.
So everything becomes political.
Yes.
You know?
And suddenly everyone's, you know, moaning at you because you say you hate your
job.
It's such a weird...
Such a weird time.
Time.
And this is one of my things.
It's one of the things I'm obsessed about.
By the way, we better tell people who I am.
Graham, you have a...
Well, I found out about you from our talent coordinator at The Mothership, who's
my good
friend, Adam Egott, who loves you to death.
And he loves your work.
He loves the shows that you've created.
He's a huge, huge fan.
So this was all because of Adam.
This all came about because of Adam.
Sure.
And then I heard the story.
It was like, oh my God, they did that guy dirty.
They did him so dirty.
And it was one of...
Why don't you tell the story of how it went down so everybody could kind of get
it from
your words, which I'm sure would be better than me fucking it up.
I'm not really good.
I've never been good.
I spent the last, you know, most of my life.
I'm 57 now.
And I spent most of my life forming a sort of...
What's the word?
You know, what's that word?
Self-deprecating, humorous personality.
So I would come out and I would make fun of myself.
I can't do that anymore because my situation is so bizarre that anything I say
that's self-deprecating
will just get reported as truth and all sorts of things.
You can't make jokes in my situation.
You know, it's so weird.
Let's explain your situation, how it started.
Well, I was a comedy writer.
I started writing journalism in Ireland when I was very young, about 19 years
old.
And I was hanging around with some funny people.
We were writing sketches and stuff like that.
So I went over to UK and I got in...
I was just very...
We sent our sketches to producers and we just...
We worked very hard to get on TV.
That succeeded.
And then I kept having early success.
I had a sitcom called Father Ted, which was about some Irish priests who were
so bad that
they'd been banished to a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.
That was a huge success.
Probably my biggest success.
Then I went on to a sitcom.
IT Crowd.
Black Books was a big one over here.
All of them I co-wrote or wrote on my own.
And people have to understand that for people that are fan of English comedy,
like your shows
were legendary.
These are amazing shows.
Thank you.
That's really kind of you to say.
Yeah, they're really big.
They're big over there.
You know, I mean, some of them travel over here.
Black Books did very well over here.
IT Crowd, I think, is probably the second most known one over here.
I think we're suffering a bit from content fatigue.
Absolutely.
There's almost too much to choose from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
There's no real reason to...
I mean, you know, the only reason I would say to watch them is, you know, some
of them
are...
Some of them really hit the target, you know?
Yeah, some of them are great.
Watch them because they're great.
But I'm just saying that the problem with anybody finding out about a new show
today,
they're like, oh, geez, another one I have to pay attention to?
How?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think that that's got to burst soon.
I think we're...
I mean, AI means the whole...
Who knows what the landscape will be like next year, you know?
It's weird.
Yeah, it really is.
It's really weird.
I watched an amazing video that someone put out today of a small film that they
made just
with prompts.
And it was some cyberpunk thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did you see that?
I know.
It's insane.
It is the next level.
It's so good.
It's like, I'd watch that movie.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, and they just made it in a few moments with prompts.
Yeah.
Like, it's over.
Yeah.
Except, I mean, the interesting thing, though, is I think...
I better get back to my story because...
Oh, we'll get to it.
Don't worry.
This is how we do things.
But the interesting thing is that I think, personally, there might be a
revolution in those kind
of smaller films that just need a few people.
You know, what's a good example?
Steven Soderbergh's early movies, Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs.
Right.
You might find people actually returning to human beings.
Because I don't know.
I mean, maybe I'm sure it will change.
But at the moment, there's a real uncanny valley feeling from all of these AI
videos.
Well, this one has an uncanny valley for sure.
See if you can find it, Jamie.
Cyberpunk.
Somebody released it on X.
It is...
I forget