Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2351 - James McCann
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T17:00:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2351 - James McCann' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2351 - James McCann' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2351 - James McCann

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
John McCann, my man.
Hey, thank you for having me here.
My pleasure.
It's a joy.
It's a joy to have you, sir.
I've been having a good time hanging out with you at the club, so.
It's been great.
I feel like we've got to do this.
This is very, ah, man, I'm trying not to spin out.
I have watched this on a phone before.
This is great.
Well, it's weird for me that it's weird for people, because to me, it's still
the same thing.
It's just sitting down and talking to people.
I've gotten so used to it, even when it's like Trump or Elon or some fucking
huge cultural figure.
It's still just like-
You must have spun out at least one time.
I spun out a bunch of times in the early days.
I still spin out every now and then, like, you know, like Mel Gibson's on the
podcast.
Like, oh, that's really Mel Gibson.
Mike Tyson, that's another one.
Yeah, he was-
Was this where he said he became a wrecked when he wanted to beat people up?
That was in California.
Okay.
Yeah, that was-
It's a classic.
It's a classic, all-time great moment.
He was scaring the shit out of me.
Whew.
Man, I spin out-
When I first got to the club, I was going-
It was every week I would-
It's weird, right?
But when I first met Adam Eagert, I went-
Oh, Mr. Eagert, I've seen you deny the holocaust.
Not really, we should be real clear.
No, he was not driving off punks under a bridge.
It's just a Norm MacDonald bit.
He features in that book a lot.
Well, Adam's an amazing guy.
Yeah.
He's the reason-
He's one of the reasons why I went back to the store.
When I was banned from the store for seven years, Adam came to visit-
You got seven years?
Yeah.
Well, I banned myself for seven years.
They banned me.
They were going to ban me for like a few weeks.
I'm like, fuck you.
Like, nay.
What did you do?
There's the whole Carlos Mencia thing.
They banned you for that?
Yes.
You won the court of public opinion on that.
Well, not only did I not really get banned, the guy who banned me was
eventually fired.
He was the manager there.
But Mitzi gave me a spot that night.
Like, before they called me to tell me I was banned, Mitzi was going through a
lot of health problems, right?
And, you know, Mitzi was- I was very close with her.
So, I called her when the whole Mencia thing happened, and I said, listen, this
guy's been a problem.
It's a real issue.
People are worried about doing material in front of him.
It's like, this is a giant problem.
And, you know, I told her the whole thing with the video, and she's like, all
right, well, just keep away from him.
What time do you want to go up tonight?
And I said, when do you want me to go up?
And she said, how about 10.30 or whatever it was?
And I said, thank you.
Okay, I love you.
Bye.
We said bye.
And then, like, fucking an hour, two hours later, I get a call from this
manager telling me that I'm banned from the store for two weeks.
And I was like, what?
Yeah.
I go, for two weeks?
I go, listen to me right now.
I'm not coming back.
I go, I'm not coming back.
And you're making a decision that's going to fuck this club up because you're
choosing to take the side of plagiarism.
Yes.
Over someone who's exposing it.
Like, the agents won't expose it.
They're making a shit ton of money.
And if the comedy store is not going to side with the artists, I'm like, listen,
this is the same conversation I had with my agent.
I lost my agent, too, for that.
I feel like those are both important moments, you know, like, everybody seems
to have a problem with their agent filing.
But also the number of people who've been banned from comedy clubs.
I was, Brian Simpson has told me about how he got banned for ages when he was
homeless.
Who, there was like, five people who were all doing banned from comedy club
stories.
But he was, he had some sort of an issue with someone there.
And this was like when Brian wasn't Brian Simpson from Netflix.
You know, it's like Brian Simpson, up-and-coming door guy that people go, oh,
that guy's funny.
But, like, if you get to run afoul with certain people.
This is what I'm trying to avoid.
I did this in Australia a lot.
You ran afoul?
I was a problem.
And I couldn't work in certain cities for some time just because I was, I think,
unpleasant.
What were you doing wrong?
You know, I started comedy.
I would go around telling people that they sucked and they should quit.
And I went to, like, the head of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
I was in the comedy competition.
It was like my fourth gig.
And I was like, you're picking all the wrong people to win these guys.
They're better.
And it just, anyway.
We grow older.
I was also 18.
And I was.
Yeah.
Oh, I get it.
Very.
No, it's.
Yeah, a lot of feuds.
A lot of telling people that they sucked.
Well, when you enter into comedy, you know, a lot of times people treat it
weirdly like sports.
You know, like they talk shit playing basketball.
So, they try to talk shit doing comedy.
Yeah.
And it's like, it's weird.
I've gotten better at it.
I think I've purged it.
But sometimes.
Well, it depends on the environment you're in.
If you're in an environment where a lot of people are doing that, it's not fun.
But this is, I find it easy here because people are, I don't want to, I don't
want to say
that everyone in Australia is bad at comedy.
There are many great comics.
But I could not for the life of, like, there were times where it's like, oh,
this could
be helpful for your career to get in with someone and have them guide you.
And it's like, I just hated everybody's comedy that I met and hung out with.
And people who were great would often leave or not be around.
Australia is kind of a different.
We've got great people out there.
But, well, listen, you got Jim Jeffries.
Yes.
I think you're the funniest guy that's ever come out of Australia.
I believe that.
No, we have Barry Humphreys.
I'll never be better.
Okay.
Do you know Barry Humphreys?
No.
The first big drag act.
I think we watched a clip once in the green room.
But, you know, the problem is the green room is so loud.
Yeah.
I'll watch him.
Barry Humphreys was the man.
He would dress up like a Dame Edna.
This was in the 70s.
He was a conservative man.
He would dress up like a housewife, like a very dowdy drag act.
And it was, like, super funny.
Really broke through in the UK.
And then the festival turned their back on him.
He started the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
And then he made some, like, trans remark.
And Hannah Gadsby, I think, was like, I'm not taking this award in his name.
Okay, you're the second funniest Australian.
I lose out to Hannah as well.
You forget about Hannah.
Hannah was a great club act.
I tell this to people all the time.
No one wants to believe it.
Well, listen, man.
It's just, she did a different thing.
A lot of people got mad at that.
But I don't get mad at things that are not for me.
It's not.
It's pointless.
It took me a while.
It was like a revolutionary act for Americans.
Because you don't have comedy festivals in the same way here.
But, like, everyone in Australia was doing the I Got Raped show.
Or the I Wanted to Commit Suicide show.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you know, everyone does an hour.
That's the only way you can.
There's only five cities.
So the comedy festivals are the only way you can really break through and make
money.
There's five clubs.
And once you're done touring them, you've got nothing.
So you have to have a new hour every year.
There was the, oh, man, there have been some great I Was Molested shows.
Shout out Corey White for one of the greatest I Was Molested shows ever.
Dave Quirk had the I Had an Affair show.
That was great.
Dad's Got Cancer.
Big show.
Oh, no.
Big show.
Mom died when I was young.
Shout out Eve.
Sort of, like, more, like, a spoken word thing than you would say stand-up
comedy?
You just, no one's even, people do all the jokes they wrote that year, which
gets you
to, like, 35 minutes.
Then you tell a 10-minute very sad story about, and then, and then I finished
my chicken curry
and I thought I'm ready to die.
And then you bring it back with a gag at the end.
And that was, like, standard?
Yeah.
It's still going on to this day.
That's so weird.
And I could never do it.
Yeah, you're, I don't want to, I couldn't imagine you doing that.
You're so, like, funny heavy.
Like, your, your comedy's very funny heavy, you know?
It feels important for comedy.
It's the fucking most important thing.
It's fun to get interesting ideas out there.
It really is.
It's fun to talk about interesting subjects.
But it's got to be funny.
I mean, I, when people have a theme.
Yeah.
Colin Quinn does this all the time and it's great.
He does, like, the, I'm going to therapy show, red state, blue state thing.
Yes.
History of America and New York is great.
He's a genius at it.
He's probably the best at it.
About, like, telling interesting subject matter, using interesting subject
matter, telling you
things you didn't know with comedy.
He, yeah.
And highlighting the ridiculousness of it all.
He was at the club and that was, that was crazy.
He's great.
He's such a good guy.
I just, time, usually, like, time is dragging on when people are on stage and
you check how
long it's gone, even if it's great, and you go, I thought we were at the 20
minute mark.
It's been six minutes or something.
Dude, you know who really blew me away is Jimmy Carr.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
He was so on when he was here.
He was doing new stuff.
I saw him running the new with the pages, yeah.
Yeah, with the pages.
But the polish, like, while he was doing the new stuff, he's so good off the
cuff that
even if the new stuff was going sideways.
People love it.
He figured out a way to turn it around.
I wish I could do that.
And would address it.
And, like, oh, he was so good.
He just sits and writes, apparently.
He's an animal.
And he teaches it, too.
He teaches it.
He has a program that they actually ran at the mothership for up and coming
comics.
Can you teach it?
I'm always wary of that.
I don't think you could teach comedy necessarily, but I think you could teach
you could learn how he does it, and you can learn how certain people do it.
And I think some of that you can apply.
And I think...
You've got Mitch Hepberg's School of Comedy.
You've got to take a lot of heroin and put your hair right over your face.
I think what you can do, though, is teach work ethic.
Yeah.
And I think that's half the battle.
Half the battle is just sitting down and actually writing.
And everyone comes up with an excuse.
It's like a cold plunge.
Everybody comes up with an excuse where they don't want a cold plunge.
And everybody comes up with an excuse where they don't write in front of a
computer or on a piece of paper.
They always write only on stage.
Listen, I mean, doing the same thing over and over again was I...
For, I don't know, seven, eight years at the start, I struggled to do it.
I had no...
I had like five bad hours of comedy.
And it wasn't until I probably impregnated my wife.
It was like, I should make sure there's a good five.
I should really boil this down to a good five minutes or I'm in real trouble.
Well, sometimes it's something like that has to happen in your life where you
really take it seriously.
Because we all know comics that, like, we started with, we're like, oh, my God,
this guy's going to be huge.
Yeah.
And for whatever reason, they didn't put in the work.
They fucked off.
They self-sabotaged.
Every town you go to, there's the guy who's going to be big.
I think if we can encourage more people, we can make less of that.
And I think we can give more people a chance.
Because I think we all could have been that person who quit.
Yeah.
And I know in the beginning, I thought about quit a bunch of times.
One of the things that helped me not quit is I tore my ACL.
Okay.
So I couldn't train or compete anymore.
Yeah.
Because I was still, like, kind of on the fence of whether I'd go back to
fighting.
Because I w