Name: Joe Rogan Experience #665 - Neal Brennan
Uploaded: 2015-06-26T01:45:48.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #665 - Neal Brennan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-06-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #665 - Neal Brennan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-06-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #665 - Neal Brennan

We're live. Neil Brennan in the middle of tweeting. What are you doing, huh?
I'm using my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge right now.
Oh, it's a beautiful phone. Hi, thanks.
Your voice is so commercial.
Thanks very much.
You were on stage the other night in the belly room, and we were in the green
room.
We're like, his voice is so commercial.
Like, it sounds like that goddamn commercial.
I'll never be able to separate the two now.
I know. I know.
I shouldn't say that commercial. I'll just say that series of commercials.
How many of those fucking things have you done?
You know what? I don't know. Probably 30.
Jesus!
I just do sessions, and then they do whatever they want.
At least you do other shit, man.
If you were just doing that, and then you became the Verizon guy, you know?
Ugh!
Can you hear me now? Like, that guy?
Ugh!
That guy's fucked!
Yeah.
He's fucked.
The Dell? You're getting a Dell?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, that guy's fucked.
Yeah.
How about the girl? The insurance girl?
Flo.
Is that her name?
Flo, yeah.
But at least they keep making those.
She is fucked once she's done, though.
Yeah.
But she's probably made a killing by this point.
Hopefully.
But is it worth it?
At what price, Flo?
At what price, Flo?
But that guy from that fucking commercial that always gets in the accidents and
falls down
and gets hurt, you know that handsome gentleman?
Yeah. They cast him in a lot of shit.
He's in movies, too.
Yeah.
He's always in movies.
He was in John Wick.
He's been...
John Wick was good, right?
Fuck yeah, it was good.
I've heard it's good, I just haven't watched it.
I mean, it's no, like, brilliant, like, super creative, undeniable work of art,
but it's fun.
It's shit as far as, like, a really wild, crazy entertainment.
It's just, it's like crazy action sequences, right?
The craziest.
Because the guy who directed it was a fight coordinator, apparently.
Yeah.
So he just had ideas for, like, the shit, the ideas he'd never given people, I
think.
Oh.
And so he was like, eh.
So he just saved it.
He basically sandbagged.
He must have.
He sandbagged everyone he worked for and then unleashed it.
Well, doesn't that work with, like, writers?
Like, you're a writer.
Doesn't that work with writers sometimes?
Like, if you see, like, especially writers that are writing for someone else,
like, a monologue or something like that?
I know what you're getting at.
No, I mean, like, look, I don't, there's certain jokes that, like, if I'm
writing for, like, rock or something, it's usually for, like, the BET awards.
So it's not like, oh, I would have done that in my, I would have done that topical
joke about Usher.
Like, fucking, in my, it's like, eh.
That's the thing about monologues.
It's like, they're pretty disposable.
But yeah, I know.
Every now and then.
People on SNL that sucked as writers and they became cast members and then all
of a sudden they had a lot of good ideas.
They just stored them all like squirrels.
Yeah, just, like, totally sandbagged people.
Yeah, because comics are, like, inherently kind of self-obsessed.
Uh-huh.
You know, and the idea of, like, writing selflessly for someone else and making
them much better.
I was talking to somebody about this yesterday.
The fact that we, it's an accepted thing in comedy.
That, it's just the accepted cast system that Rock is basically saying, like,
hey, I'm funnier than you.
And I'm hosting a show, so fucking give me jokes.
Is that what you're saying?
And he's kind of, that's what the world's saying.
I don't think it's that explicit.
There is, at the same time, there's something flattering about the fact that,
like, one of the best comics wants him to run.
It's like, great.
But there's also something about, like, you, come here, rub my back.
I gotta, hey, other MMA fighter, come rub my back.
You're not in this fight.
I'm ranked higher than you, so come rub my back.
You're just like, okay.
You get paid and it's fun and all that stuff.
See, I don't think of it that way at all.
I think of it as, first of all, for him.
Honestly, I don't either.
I know you don't.
It's very intelligent for him, because it's a smart way to do it, and a lot of
people don't do it that way.
They don't bring in other people to help them, and their work can kind of
suffer.
Yeah.
You know?
Like, he's pretty smart in that way, that he's, like, looking at it objectively,
like, there's other strong people around.
If I bring them in, it'll make my already strong act even stronger.
He doesn't do it for his act.
He'll do it for TV shows.
Monologues.
And so it's not, and the other thing with Rock is, it's generally, you write
stuff for him and send it to him so that he can be confident in his shit.
So you're like, okay, my shit's better than this, like, which is fine.
Well, you just need, like, a giant mound of shit to chop away at, and then you
find, like, where the gems are.
Yes.
If you only have, like, a few, like, pretty decent ideas and you're trying to
build them up, that's way less effective than an enormous catalog of ideas.
You get to cherry pick the best ones.
Yeah, that's what Rock always says.
He's like, I, like, I have comedy writers around the way.
Rappers have gold chains.
Like, that's all he spends his money on.
You know what I mean?
Like, if he's gonna, he's not gonna have, he's not gonna buy a chain.
He's like, I'll just have a writer write for a fucking movie with me or
something.
That's smart.
Yeah.
Well, that's why he's Chris Rock.
He's got a, you know, his effective strategy for optimizing all of his shows
and all of his sets and all, you know, he knows the fuck he's doing.
The thing that I was, when you were saying about having other people come in
and look, I find that a lot of guys, comedian-wise, when you get to the theater
level, it's basically all your audiences are henpecked.
All of your audiences are predisposed to like you.
Do you ever, and what I found is a lot of people, when they go to theaters,
their act either plateaus or gets worse.
Do you find, do you ever specifically go to rooms where they don't know you're
coming so you can get a better read on shit?
Yeah, well, I do a lot of sets during the day, like regular sets at the improv
or the store where they're there to see a wide variety of people.
I do a lot of those.
I think those are important.
I think sets at the store are important, period, because it's a fucking jaded
group down there.
It's beautiful and magical, but it's jaded.
Yeah.
It's the hardest room in the world.
The belly room?
Yeah.
You might as well be doing stand-up for one person.
A hundred percent.
I mean, people are right in front of you.
The worst part of a belly room is there's people to the right that could just
charge the stage.
They're right there.
They're fucking right there.
They could just sprint at you.
Yeah.
Well, it's also, they have, you know, it's great, though.
Like, all we're saying, you know, about the thing, like the worst part of it,
but even the worst part about it is magic, because that room is fucking magic,
man.
That belly room, if you get something to work in that belly room, what we were
talking about this last night, that there's the belly room and the ice house,
and the ice house is maybe the best club ever.
It's got the rep, and having done it, it's like the easiest club.
Easiest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's just set up perfect.
Yeah.
The ceiling is low.
Everyone's stuffed in there.
It's very contagious laughter.
It's great acoustics.
It's all wood everywhere.
The laughter really reverberates.
And it's got, whatever the fuck, 50 years of comedy burned into the walls.
It's the oldest club in the country.
I think it's older than 50 years old.
Isn't it?
I think that, I think it's like.
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it's like 55 years old or something like that.
But it's the, it's essentially the oldest comedy club on earth, because the
oldest clubs for comedy were in America.
It's the oldest one in America.
So it's the oldest, longest running club ever.
So it's, it's a super rare place, but it's way easier than like the OR or
especially the belly room.
It's a different kind of.
Yeah.
Louie was saying in an interview, like when he does, when he's in LA, he'll go,
he'll do like an alternative show.
Then he'll do the improv or the laugh factory.
And then he'll do the store.
And it's like, if it works, he's like, everything will work at an alternative
room.
Some stuff will work at the improv and one thing will work at the store.
And the one thing that works at the store that he keeps.
That's smart.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you need all of those.
Because when I was just doing the store only, I think my act suffered a little
bit.
I think.
Where does it go?
Because that's the thing.
It's hard to, what is the psychographic of the store?
You think they, because I still couldn't tell you, having been working there
six, seven years,
I still couldn't tell you like the psychology of that kind of part of the, of
the average of the audience's collective unconscious kind of thing.
Well, it, first of all, let me just say this.
It's way better now.
The second, my second run at the store from 2007 on, I wasn't there.
So I started up again, December 14.
It's way better.
It's just better.
It's a better club.
The young guys coming up are better.
There's a better vibe.
The audiences are better.
Yeah, when I was there in the, in the early 2000s, man, I was a war zone.
It was all old.
It was all old timers, right?
I mean, it was a lot of old, but it was also the audience was just like
monsters.
There was a lot of monsters, like rapey, dumb, heckly, drunky, no crowd control
at all.
They have real crowd control now.
They'll kick people out if they're retarded.
Yeah.
They didn't used to do that.
They'll kick people out if they say eight things.
Yeah.
You have to say eight.
Yeah.
You have to say fucking eight.
Any of these clubs like, no, we're good.
It's fucking get them out.
They're not going to, they, if, yeah, if they say more than one thing, get them
out.
They kicked a guy out at the ice house last night.
He started like early on this one bit.
He would kept yelling the same thing out while the bit was going on.
I figured, let me ignore him.
And then we got to the end of the bit and he's still yelling out the thing.
I'm like, I heard you, you fuck.
And he's like, well, no, I was talking about that thing on your podcast.
I go, we're not having a conversation.
It's a fucking show.
Yeah.
And then he keeps going.
I'm like, oh, fucking Christ.
And then when the bouncers come over to take them away, he goes, are you
serious?
Like, I was helping.
What do you think?
They just picked you?
Yeah.
They just randomly picked a guy and decided to fuck with them.
That's what I said the other day to a woman who was yelling.
I go, do you go to fucking Katy Perry concerts, sit at the bottom of the stage
and just sing
along with her?
Shut the fuck up.
Like, I don't need your help.
They didn't book the show and go, those four guys and then hopefully someone
will come
and heckle them.
Yeah, but a Katy Perry concert, if you go and sit there and sing along with her,
it's probably
flattering.
She can't hear you.
Yeah.
But if you're trying to, if you're at the foot of the stage doing it, it's
probably annoying.
The worst would be if you were saying, don't sing that song.
Yes, precisely.
Don't you have another song?
What's your best song?
The player was telling me, the name drop, was saying that the biggest issue at
his show
is now, girls running to the foot of the stage, turning their back to him and
taking a selfie.
Oh, no.
He said, he has security to, like, stop it.
It's like, if I didn't stop it, there'd be hundreds of people every show.
Wow.
And it's hugely distracting because there's a thing darting at the thing you're
looking at.
Yeah.
Well, don't you find it distracting when you look out into the crowd and you
see, like,
10 phones up, taking photos of you?
Yeah.
Or taking a selfie or taking a picture?
Hey, here I am with Neil Brennan Show.
Yeah.
Hey, you.
Killing it.
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