Joe Rogan hit back at Marc Maron’s unfiltered critiques of him and his podcast, suggesting the comedian’s cats are making him “irrational” and “weird.”
“Have you ever known people that have outdoor cats, and they’re very irrational—Marc Maron,” Rogan said on his podcast after Maron, along with comedian Tim Heidecker, called out The Joe Rogan Experience. “Those people probably have toxo, which is why they’re behaving weird,” he continued, suggesting that Maron, a longtime cat enthusiast, may have caught the cat-carrying parasite that causes toxoplasmosis.
Rogan’s attempt to hit back at Maron pales in comparison to what Maron has accused him and his “anti-woke” friends of—namely, “humanizing fascism” and ushering in “the amazing lack of diversity and diminishment of human rights and collective fear you have supported” by using their platforms to support Donald Trump.
On his WTF podcast Monday, Maron said Rogan spends his show “skirting around an issue that you don’t understand with information that you don’t understand either.”
“We put our finger on it, you know, and said, this is what’s annoying about” Rogan’s podcast, Heidecker told Maron, explaining his own parody of Rogan. “It wasn’t even political… It was just like, how boring it is and how going in circles you end up going.” But Maron’s gripe with Rogan’s uber popular podcast and the man behind it go way deeper, with Maron at one point taking the blame for Rogan’s rise.
Maron said that pioneering the podcast space with his (soon-to-end) WTF show came at a big price.
“WTF was there at the beginning of the podcast invasion,” he said in June, and “The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and Rogan.”
Rogan’s show premiered just months after Maron’s but by 2016, had completely surpassed other shows of its kind to become one of the most listened to podcasts in the world. “We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self expression,” Maron said then. “Sadly, on some level, we also unleashed a format that can be used for dubious means—propaganda and pure evil.”
As Rogan has used his platform to spread COVID misinformation, conspiracy theories, and lend a helping hand to Trump’s re-election, Maron has consistently expressed his disdain for him and his likeminded buddies.
“You guys started this anti-woke s–t and everybody was upset about pronouns and not being able to say ‘r—-d,’” Maron said. “But now they have policy built around this and there’s real-world consequences for everybody.”
Rogan, like his MAGA-fan acolyte Tony Hinchcliffe, have only responded to Maron with brief, schoolyard taunts. When asked whether or not he and Maron had “beef,” at The House of Comedy last month, Hinchcliffe replied, “I don’t ever acknowledge these guys, these mentally ill people, when they go online and start talking about me and my friends and calling us Nazis.”
He went on to say that Maron has been “on multiple episodes of ‘Kill Tony’” and “always smiled right to my face,” and that Maron is only “talking s–t” for promotion.
Rogan took a similar shot last month when he also suggested that Maron was jealous of him and his “friends.” He said on his podcast, “When there’s a walled garden, there’s a bunch of people that are doing really well together and they’re hanging out together and they have fun and you’re not in that group, you start getting mad at that and you find reasons why that’s bad because you know, you want something like that in your life, which we all do.”
He also insisted at the time that he and his right-wing friends are not “anti-woke.”
Maron talked at length about his cats in a profile for Men’s Health, giving Rogan fodder for mocking him this week with the “toxo” bit. The comedian and podcaster told the magazine that one of his cats, Buster, “showed up on the porch of my old house, eating from the food that I would feed the feral cats. And he was a kitten, like three months old. He had been out in the wild for a bit because he’s kind of… intense. But I trapped him.”
Rogan teased the comedian in response, saying, “That parasite, toxoplasmosis, it affects humans. It affects behavior. It makes you more impulsive, more aggressive.”
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