WATCH: Trevor Noah Derided People Who ‘Like to Unearth Things’ When His Own Jokes Resurfaced — Which Doesn’t Absolve Joe Rogan

Trevor Noah piled on Joe Rogan this week, even though he derided people who dug up his old jokes a few years back. That doesn’t absolve Rogan, but listen to the interview anyway.

Joe Rogan doesn’t need absolution, anyway. It’s weird how Rogan fans keep trying to downplay or diminish the importance of Rogan’s n-word compilation tape — THAT ROGAN APOLOGIZED FOR. The guy you’re defending has already said he fucked up!

Did he apologize well? That’s for the audience to decide. The formats in which it is marginally permissible for a non-Black person to say the n-word — when directly quoting someone else, when singing along to NWA, when discussing the word itself — have shifted over the decades, but it’s never been universally accepted in any of those contexts. But Rogan at least acknowledged he sees the harm now.

His apology for the time he compared a Black neighborhood to the Planet of the Apes was pure nonsense:

I was telling a story in the podcast about how me and my friend Tommy and his girlfriend, we got really high. We’re in Philadelphia and we went to go see Planet of the Apes, and we didn’t know where we were going. We just got dropped off by a cab and we got dropped off in this all-Black neighborhood. And I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said we got out. And it was like we were in Africa, so like we were in Planet of the Apes.

I did not, nor would I ever say that Black people are apes, but it sure fucking sounded like that. And I immediately afterwards said, That’s a racist thing to say. The Planet of the Apes wasn’t even in Africa. I was just saying, there’s a lot of Black people there.

So it sounds like he’s saying he was accidentally racist? Remember that song?

People will decide how they feel about those apologies, or the stuff he didn’t apologize for like the transphobia and the saying White people have better brains and the guest who said Black people have a violence gene and so on and so forth. Sam Harris may not have priced all that in when he said, correctly in principle, that “A sincere apology is a moral good, as is the forgiveness with which it is often met.”

The market will decide too.

OR maybe Joe Rogan will decide to turn himself around and become a crusader for marginalized people and use his influence to do good.

But that brings us to Trevor Noah, for whom Rogan’s apology was not sufficient. Noah made that plain in a lengthy and blistering commentary:

Noah’s own offensive joke controversies make an ideal heat shield for Rogan stans, because Noah didn’t even apologize, and he got away with it, and apparently, Joe Rogan defended him.

Now, Noah did sort of acknowledge the offensiveness of his jokes, but it’s true, he did not come anywhere near to an apology. He derided the outrage in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

I understand where it comes from. But people would say, “Are you going to change?” And I’d say, “You went back three years to find the tweets! If I haven’t repeated those things, haven’t I changed?” If you look back three years and you’re not disappointed in who you were then, you’re not progressing.

But we live in a world of faux outrage. It’s hashtag this, hashtag that. There are people who jump onto trends before they even know what the trend is about. People want to be part of the good, but they don’t want to put the work in, so they think, “Can’t I just say that I agree?” Then you have an artificial inflation of what the problem is. All of the sudden you get all of these big scandals, but they’re not big, because everyone is on the periphery of the argument.

Even years later, he told GQ “I’ve seen that Twitter outrage thing before. I’ve seen people lose their jobs over it. People love full outrage. You get to be a protestor in your underwear. You don’t have to leave your house.”

And he was even more derisive to outrage when another old routine stirred controversy — a pretty disgusting rant about indigenous women in Australia.

He told the audience that “all women of every race can be beautiful,” and added “And I know some of you are sitting there now going, ‘Uh Trevor, yah, but I’ve never seen a beautiful Aborigine. ‘Yeah, but you know what you say? You say ”yet”, that’s what you say; ”yet”. Because you haven’t seen all of them, right?’ Plus it’s not always about looks, maybe Aborigine women do special things, maybe they’ll just like, jump on top of you and… [makes weird digeridoo noise and pantomime]”

The 2013 clip resurfaced in 2019, and Noah did an interview to address it. It couldn’t have been more on the nose if Patch Adams wore it to cheer up his patients:

You know, what’s interesting is like, I guess, you know, we live in a world where, you know, people always want to unearth things that have already been unearthed. You know, people going like we discovered something that didn’t need to be discovered because it was out there. But the most important thing for me was at the time, I just want to make a joke about how all women are beautiful. And I was responding to my comments about certain women being called unflattering in South Africa. And so, you know, it’s one of those things where if you’re if you want to make the joke again, you would probably make it better. And like after I came to Australia, you know, I was lucky enough to meet an Aboriginal woman. That’s one of the museums in Melbourne. And she just was like, Hey, man, like, I’ve seen your stuff and she’s like, Let me tell you why that joke like why in Australia, particularly hurtful. And and I you know what? I’m not trying to hurt people with comedy. Otherwise, I would get into a different job. And so if I’m not trying to hurt someone with a joke, then I see no, no reason to hold on to the joke. And so, you know, that’s that’s why, you know, people have to go to find a joke from 2013 to to to basically speak about it because the joke wasn’t done anymore. But but I understand how outrage works. So you know, you have to work within it.

He went on to say more:

What I understand about outrage, though, is people. What I mean is people don’t generally want to listen or understand from their side. They go, No, we’re angry. And regardless of how many times you speak about the thing, they still want to be angry. And so all you can do is pull back and say, Hey, I’ve addressed this and you know, I know people who follow me know that I’ve addressed this.

None of that is an apology, although Noah does repeatedly acknowledge the hurt and sounds apologetic… maybe apologetish?

But there’s a kernel of good advice in there. All you can do when you mess up is try to make it right, and your effort will either be sufficient or it won’t, and people either will or won’t accept it. Rogan can take a look at all the things he’s taking criticism for and decide if he wants to apologize, repent, and repair the harm he sees he’s done.

I suspect that a lot of Rogan’s critics believe that such a miraculous turnaround would be more deleterious to Rogan’s audience size than any campaign of criticism could manage. We will probably never know.

And for Mr. Noah, it is never too late to apologize and set a good example.

Listen above via ABC Australia.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.