Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk
Uploaded: 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1726 - Chuck Palahniuk

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Good to see you, man.
Hey, welcome back.
Welcome back to you too.
I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years.
And during those three years, it seems like censorship issues and issues of
what you can and can't say and what isn't isn't acceptable.
They seem to be ramping up.
And you are, in my mind, one of the more interesting and dangerous writers out
there because you you tap into these super uncomfortable stories and you're
willing to explore areas in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid.
We talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous
stories that you had workshopped and people had gotten upset at you for.
But I really wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know how this is
affecting you, how this weird climate of hypersensitivity and purity tests is
sort of affecting your writing.
This is the dead air part.
Scooch up to the mic.
Okay.
You know, and I don't want to kind of shoot my wad with a big term, but have
you ever heard of absurdist existentialism?
No, I haven't.
Okay.
I can piece the two words together.
You know, I used to, when I look back at the books that I really loved growing
up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon
called absurdist existentialism.
Do you remember the book Geek Love?
Yes.
Geek Love.
Could Catherine write Geek Love right now?
It is about a man and a woman who own a failing circus and they decide the way
to save their circus is to have deformed babies.
So they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation, and they give
birth to ultimately a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole
crew of children that don't live, that are in the circus culture.
They're called pickled punks.
Those kind of deformed babies and formaldehyde.
Catherine wrote that book.
It was the first banner book under the new director at Knopf, Sonny Mehta.
It was one of the top-selling books of the 20th century.
It was a huge success.
And it really is absurdist existentialism.
And the general idea is that life is so messed up, so unfixable, that we might
as well go right to the crazy.
And Vonnegut wrote it, Tom Robbins wrote it throughout the 70s, still life with
Woodpecker and Matches, even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Nathaniel West wrote it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the 20s.
These people who had survived the Spanish flu and survived the First World War.
And that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so
messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist
existentialism.
And there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that.
And so my goal is always to try to write the kind of book I want to read.
And I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love.
Regardless of whether or not Catherine could write it.
Because even if she wasn't dead, she could not write that book anymore.
There's something about writing and reading that kind of stuff where you really,
you can never capture it in any other medium.
And I think in some ways even audio books don't do justice to some of the
darker ideas because you kind of want to piece them together in your own mind.
And as you're reading it in silence and the author's ideas are coming to life
inside your head, you know, your own creativity and imagination are intertwined
with the work of the artist to try to fill in the visuals of the work.
It's a place where that's the only way you can truly get the most out of those
really twisted ideas.
Well, and because also to be made literal enough to film or even to be said out
loud kind of destroys that intimacy where it only occurs in your mind.
It occurs in a kind of sub-vocalization and in the kind of sympathetic neural
phenomenon that's happening when you read a verb, studies have shown that your
body thinks that you are running.
Your body thinks that you are doing what the verb is saying.
And you lose that when you hear it out loud and you lose it, especially when it
has to be made literal enough to be filmed.
Another absurdist existentialist book, Confederacy of Dunces.
You know, John Goodman, God bless him, he has had that book optioned for
decades and that will never be a movie because it is filled with racist humor.
It is filled with misogynistic humor and it is filled with homophobic humor.
It is completely an unfilmable book, but people adore Confederacy of Dunces and
it won the Pulitzer Prize, but it cannot be made literal enough to become a
movie.
Yeah, there's books that were made at a different time where even today people
don't want you reading them anymore, right?
And that might be one of them.
If that ever gets under the spotlight and people start examining some of the
things in that book, that might be one of those books where people just decide
you shouldn't be reading that anymore.
Well, I think there's kind of a political aspect, too.
I've seen some essays about why Mel Gibson can just get crazier and crazier and
he's not canceled and why Roseanne Barr gets crazy one night on Ambien and she's
gone.
And a lot of these essays, for the most part, say it's because Mel Gibson is
making people money and that people generally like Mel Gibson.
They really like Mel Gibson and nobody really wants to cancel him, where
supposedly Roseanne Barr had offended so many people and she was so difficult
that people were really gunning for any opportunity to cancel her.
And I think with Confederacy of Dunces, with these really beloved books, people
like them too much to really put them under that kind of microscope.
The people that do like them, right?
Yeah.
My worry is that people that don't even know about them or haven't read them
will get a hold of it.
You know, I think that the books still have so much traction in the culture
that they can't be canceled out.
They might be passed hand to hand, but they will always be in print.
They removed Tom Sawyer from some schools and there was some talk about censoring
it and changing the words because the N-word's in it so much.
You know, my book, Make Something Up, was the biggest censored book of 2016 and
I think the only adult censored book of 2016.
But it's still read.
It's still out there.
Just because a book is kind of removed from libraries, you know, doesn't end
the book.
What was so censored about it?
I didn't read that.
Oh, dear God.
It had a...
Do you remember the story of Mr. Hand, the man?
Yes.
It had a very touching story about the guy whose daughter ended up buying this
horse over the Internet at an auction.
And he realized that she was only buying the horse because it had this sordid
background.
And she intended to exploit this horse, you know, by having her friends take
selfies with it.
Oh, it was Mr. Hand's horse.
It was Mr. Hand's horse.
Oh.
And also he was getting all these bids for tens of hundreds of millions of
dollars from people around the world who also wanted Mr. Hand's horse for their
own purposes.
And this is just one of 23 different stories that were all more or less each
offensive in their own way.
Don't.
It's not Roland Dahl.
The Mr. Hand story was wild.
Did you ever see the documentary about it?
It's called Zoo.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of people hate that documentary, but I have to like it because
one of my best friend's brother-in-law made that documentary.
So officially, I love that documentary.
Officially.
Officially.
It wasn't the best, but how do you make a documentary about something that you
can't show?
You know, it's like they were in a weird position.
Well, do you remember Into the Wild, the first big Krakauer book?
When you go through that book, it's really fascinating because you know that Krakauer
only had so much material about Chris McCandless.
It's just a few months out of the kid's life.
And so how does he deal with that material?
So he starts in kind of after the fact, establishing the bus, the death scene.
And then he starts in a very linear, deep flashback, taking Chris McCandless up
to a certain point.
And then he expands for several chapters saying Chris is not the first young
guy at that age to sort of throw everything away and hit the road.
And he profiles maybe a half dozen sort of famous guys who did the exact same
thing and kind of disappeared in the culture.
And so he expands the theme, showing that historically, it's not a one-off,
that young men have always taken these kind of pilgrimages to find themselves.
And then just before Chris McCandless is killed, he depicts himself climbing
that steep mountain in Alaska by himself at the age of 23 and almost dying.
And so he illustrates the theme over and over, both with McCandless in the
present and with these historical figures doing the exact same thing.
And then with himself explaining why this story is so compelling for him,
because he did the same thing at that age and he didn't die.
And then we show Chris dying.
And so if you're going to do the zoo story, you need to expand it beyond the
story itself.
You need to look for where it occurs and is sort of illustrated in other
aspects of the culture, both historically and in other parts of the world.
You need to expand the theme beyond just what actually happened.
How would you do that?
Oh, my gosh.
You know.
Talk about the culture of people that are zoofiliacs?
Exactly.
You would go down that road.
You'd probably pixelate a lot of faces.
Yeah.
You'd also talk historically.
You'd find some academic to talk about it.
Yeah.
It would have been very easy to do.
Hmm.
But it would have taken a little more work.
Yeah.
Well, they had like recreations in that, didn't they?
Like these actors or something.
They did.
And they were always kind of soft focus and they were shadows on walls.
We should probably tell people what we're talking about.
Mr. Hands is a video about a guy getting fucked to death by a horse.
It's not necessarily the video that's available that you can watch.
And we found it the other day and we watched it.
It's not the guy actually getting fucked to death by the horse.
It is just him getting fucked by the horse.
Apparently, they don't have the video of him actually dying or the one time
that killed him.
It punctured his organs or whatever it did internally that ruptured him.
They had to bring him to the emergency room.
And then the police were called and they started questioning him like, what's
going on here?
And then they found out that, well, the whole story was that it's legal in
Washington state to have sex with animals.
Or it was.
It was, yeah.
Because of this death, they changed the laws.
But these people would meet online.
I guess they had like a website that they would go to.
And then they would say, you know, hey, my buddy's got a farm.
Let's party.
And it wasn't even his farm.
He was the caretaker of some wealthy people who had these horses.
And the wealthy people had no idea that they were running a brothel.
Yeah.
See, the thing about Into the Wild is that's a story that many people can sort
of relate to.
You can kind of relate to this idea that society and materialism and the road
that everyone's on is fruitless and filled with angst.
And no one wants to live like that.
But they just do.
They do because everyone has before them.
But really, you're better off just being free and just going into the wild.
Like that appeals to so many people, the idea that the path that we're heading
down with civilization is, it's not healthy, it's not natural, and ultimately
it's going to be our demise.
So there's so many people that like the idea of going to the woods is really
appealing.
The idea of getting fucked to death by a horse, far more difficult sell.
Like, you know, to make it relatable.
You know, and I don't think it's ever going to be relatable, relatable.
But at least in the short story that I wrote, the main character makes the
point, or he explores the point that we find it funny because