Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2330 - Bono
Uploaded: 2025-05-30T17:01:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2330 - Bono' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2330 - Bono' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2330 - Bono

I fucking loved the film. It was really great.
You saw it?
I watched it last night, yeah.
It was cool too because I always feel special when I got to enter in the
password because
I know that nobody else has seen it yet, you know, I got to enter in the email
and the
password and I watched it and I screen mirrored it on the TV.
It was great, man.
And it was so, like, almost like a fever dream.
It was wild, like the way you set it up, all black and white.
Yeah, if you get past the first three minutes, even my own mates are like, oh,
don't do that.
It's like, wow.
And it is like a fever dream, that opening.
But that really happened to me.
It was great, man.
It was great.
And it's also like I love the way you did it.
Like you played the beginning of some songs and you talked about the origin of
the songs.
The thing that I have a hard time believing, though, is that you weren't a good
singer when
you were young.
Well, you know, punk rock, you're a bit of a shouter.
You know, that's really what you do.
You just get up there and shout.
I'm shouting at God.
I'm shouting at everyone.
I'm shouting at the band.
That scene when we're doing I Will Follow.
Yeah.
That's really true.
So I'm there and we're improvising this song that becomes I Will Follow.
If you walk away, walk away, walk away.
I mean, it's like this one.
We're trying to get just do something original.
And we're really ripping off.
The irony is we're really ripping off Public Image Limited.
This Johnny Rotten became John Lydon again for this band called Public Image
Limited back
in the late 70s, and I'm singing about, you know, it's a suicide note, really,
and I'm singing
about this, and they're saying, like, what's it about?
And I said, I think it's this guy who's going to follow somebody into the grave.
You know, they're going to, it's, I think it's about, it's a, it's a, it's a
child following
their mother, missing them so much that it'll follow them into the grave.
Whoa.
And then we realized that our, our, our rehearsal room, the little yellow house
is beside the
cemetery where my mother is buried.
And I have never visited her once or talked about her once.
And we're, we've been rehearsing there for months.
And it's funny, you know, you can deny somebody in conversation, you can deny
somebody to yourself,
but in the songs, all that shit comes out.
Wow.
Wow.
But thank you for watching it.
That's, that's.
I loved it.
Thank you.
It was such an interesting way you put it all together.
I've never seen anybody do that like that.
Like you did, like, it's like a documentation of your career, but in this like
very unique
way with like talking about things and explaining these moments.
And then the music plays it's, and it's all black and white.
It was really cool.
Yeah, there's a, there's a sort of black and white lens, it a kind of clarity.
I did this series of shows in the, the beacon theater in New York and, and it
was going so
well.
We thought we should record it.
I will tell you the night before we opened our show in New York, my Mrs.
Allie said, I don't think you should do this.
Just please, please do not do this to yourself in front of, you know, a New
York crowd.
Cancel it now, do what most people do on a book tour, get somebody to interview
them and just,
they'll come anyway.
Everyone will be happy.
And I don't know.
I just went for once.
I'm, I didn't take her sage advice and I, I did it.
And the difference was with an audience, it was funny.
And she was like, oh, that's the bit I didn't get in the rehearsals.
It's funny.
Oh, so what was she thinking?
It was self-indulgent?
It just thought it was dull, self-indulgent.
Here you are.
I mean, all these things are a version of, let me, here's another great thing
about me.
No, I mean, it isn't, I was calling it a memoir, me book, what I wrote myself.
It's the memoir.
And it looked at something narcissistic and, but it's, it's your material.
You know, that's what you get.
You're, you know, you're, it's not just your body, your psychology.
It's the canvas.
And, you know, I grew up John Lennon, you know, the Beatles were everything for
me.
And, you know, John Lennon made a sort of performance art out of his wedding to
Yoko.
And he did a bed in for peace and he was ready to look ridiculous for peace.
And, you know, I do ridiculous quite well, I'm told.
So that was my definition, you know, of, of art really.
Yeah.
Was to just, just go out there.
But the thing that being in U2, which has given me everything, took away, if it
took away anything, was, you know, people don't come along to our shows for a
belly laugh.
You know what I mean?
Right, right.
So as a comedian, you understand that, you know, it's, it's like, I, you know,
I wrote this line, I came out of nowhere.
I haven't put it in a song yet, I don't think.
But, you know, I think it's laughter is the evidence of freedom.
And I don't talk, I don't trust people to talk about freedom now.
I want people to be free.
If you are, if you talk, be, be it then.
Be it.
Yeah.
And, and so I wanted to be that on stage.
I wanted to be loose.
I wanted to be myself.
I wanted to own up to the ridiculousness of my life, as I've just explained,
the madness of my family.
But turns out it's everyone's family is a little opera.
And it is a bit of a soap opera, but it's also, also a, a real opera.
These are big feelings, you know, you're going after your dad, like you're like
a young, or, you know, elk is a romantic word for it.
But it's, you know, you're just taking them on.
Yeah.
And this poor man is just, he's lost his, his wife.
He's trying to bring up two kids.
I'm just an obnoxious kind of thing who some, somehow psychologically blames
him for the death of my mother.
Because as Jim Sheridan says to me, it doesn't have to be actually true to be
psychologically true.
And that kids feel all these feelings, you know, and they don't have to be
logical.
And, and I went after my dad and I, by playing him every night in, in the Beacon
Theater and around the world, I actually learned to, to love him.
I learned to like him, actually.
I always loved him, but I learned to like him.
That was, he made me laugh more.
So I got humor.
Humor was the gift from that show.
And the humor was evident with the audience there.
Hmm.
Yeah.
But not evident when my missus came, which is why she wanted to pull the plug.
Well, rehearsals are hard.
It's also hard when someone is too close to you.
Right.
They're there with you every day.
Like, this is true with comedy as well.
Like, if someone sees your act too many times, like, if someone's traveling
with you, like, if my wife went to see my shows all the time, there's parts of
it she'd be like, oh, don't do that.
Oh, don't do this.
Oh, like, that's not, like, you get too close to it.
Like, she's too close to you.
But to see it with fresh eyes, like, to see it in front of that audience, the
joy that they have when the music starts playing, when some of the songs that
they love, it's amazing.
Like, you could feel it in the show.
It's like the pure joy.
What they get so, because the people that came to see it were hardcore fans.
Well, what happened was Andrew Dominick, Australian director, and he did some
of the shots without any audience.
Just he cleared them out on a day off.
And then some of them came in, which were hardcore fans, as you say.
And that was, in a way, that was the most terrifying.
Because I, as a performer, I'm drawn to spontaneous acts.
That's what, when we started out as a band, I was attracted to performers who I
thought might leave the stage.
Right.
And follow me home, mug me, or, you know, tell my fortune, or, you know,
whatever.
Wild people.
Well, just, yeah.
I mean, and I'm still attracted.
Iggy Pop, when I was growing up, was the, you know, Patti Smith.
Patti Smith used to enter the stage elbowing her way through the crowd.
Myself and Larry Mullen, drummer and you two, we left stage one night in a,
like, when we were, like, 21, 20 years old, elbowing our way through the crowd
to get out.
Just got into a taxi in London, fucked off.
And we felt a liberation, you know, breaking the fourth wall has been
everything for our bands.
Trying to smash it by surfing it, you know, by jumping into the crowd.
I had the preposterous moment of going into a crowd in the, in Los Angeles, I
forget, the forum or somewhere like that, with the white flag, right?
The non-violent white flag, the same flag that I'm still on about, the flag of
surrender, right, in that show.
But back then, I'm 23 or whatever, and I'm going into the crowd and I see
people who are, you know, pulling at me and all that.
The next thing, I'm throwing a punch.
Somebody in our own, in our own audience, that's how much non-violence meant to
me.
You know, but I'm attracted to feral performers, I suppose, is a word for it.
It's just, it's, it's, you're in it, and you're not fully in control of it.
Right.
And Mark Rylands is a great one.
Daniel Day-Lewis walked off stage one night, saw a ghost of his father, rumor,
had it, when he was playing Hamlet.
But, yeah, so having the crowd in who knew what was going to happen, that unnerves
me a bit.
Because, how do I surprise them?
Turns out, by making, I became a sit-down comic.
Is that what you're, if you're a stand-up, for a minute, a minute, I was a sit-down
comedian.
Well, what you're doing, and I think what you're saying, that you're attracted
to, is something that's not contrived.
Something that's pure.
It could be messy.
It could be wild.
It could be, you know, Patti Smith elbowing people, or you running through the
crowds.
It's real.
And there's so much in this world that's not real.
There's so much that's manufactured.
There's so much that's produced and run through a focus group.
And there's so much that doesn't resonate.
Like, you don't feel it as a piece of art.
You don't feel it as, like, a real person pouring out their emotions and their
soul.
But great music, you feel.
It gets into you.
It gets into your cells, you know?
Yeah.
No one can figure out how it works or why it works or why this does and this
doesn't.
And why does Johnny Cash have such a fucking cool voice?
Like, what is it?
What is it?
Like, but there's something about real that's just, it's like a vitamin.
It's like going out in the sun when it's been raining.
Like, oh, like, you soak it in.
Yeah, it is, you know, I mean, there's pretentious ways of describing it.
And people say it's, we first sang to each other before we spoke.
You know, it's like bird song.
I don't know who said that.
It's probably on drugs.
But it could have been a scientist.
And anthropology might suggest we certainly, the goat song, you go back to
Greek tragedy.
You had a drum and a voice.
So it's very primal.
Yeah.
And, and there is, it is the language of the spirit.
It, we, we, it is, it's somehow there is worship involved, whether it's God,
nature, money,
a extraordinary woman has just walked across the street.
But it seems to be that music is where we are creatures of awe.
Yes.
And, and, and wonder.
And, and, and, you know, you mentioned Johnny Cash.
I, I had, I had the blessing in my life of, of getting to know him.
And, and as a believer, I don't know if you know, I, I'm a believer, I'm, I'm
just not a very good one.
But, but he, there was no, there was no, not a pious bone in his body.
And, and I learned that about the company he would choose.
He didn't like, he got nervous around people who were too self-righteous.
And he had this huge spirit in him, you know, prayerful spirit.
Myself and Adam Clayton were, were driving through America, I think around the
time of the Joshua Tree.
And I'd met Johnny a couple of years where he said, you know, I found out where
he, where he lived.
He had a zoo in Nashville.
He had a house in Nashville.
And we go into, to, to meet June, uh, his missus and, and Johnny.
And, and he shows us this table filled with plates of everything.
Like, I'm like, wow, we're coming with just the two of us.
He said, no, honey, that's m