I have been on a real David Foster Wallace kick lately¹ and there is no way that isn’t going to work itself into this essay. If you’re clicking out of this now to mow the lawn, dust the hard to reach spaces in your house, or clip your toenails, I understand.

Every single stand up act that is actually funny has an undercurrent of anger. Yes, even Nate Bargatze. Yes, even Mitch Hedberg. Yes, even that perma-stoned guy with the movies podcast. Comics feast on rage. Comics famine on placidity. I will die on this hill.

That said, DeRosa is what I would call an especially angry comic. He isn’t yelling for an hour, filled with rage, and seemingly bound for an imminent heart attack like Lewis Black or even on the softer side of that spectrum, his friend, Bill Burr.² His is an anger that slowly escapes over the course of his act like the smoke hissing out of a pressure cooker. DeRosa’s specific MO is that he is judgmental, captious, and able to get thoroughly riled up by just about anything.³ It’s why we love him.

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden⁴ does not depart from this trend. It’s peak Joe DeRosa as we know and love him.

DeRosa opens by walking on stage and immediately sitting down, a deliberate choice to mitigate the negativity of the first words out of his mouth. “I wouldn’t kill myself but if an opportunity for death came, I wouldn’t walk away from it.” DeRosa expounds that suicide is too proactive but if an active shooter were to enter the comedy club, he’d walk right up to him and demand to be taken out first.

DeRosa then promises an hour of “hopeless comedy” right out of the gate.

Buckle up.

DeRosa continues in very DeRosa fashion⁵. Life is shit; it’s just a big let-down. DeRosa is sick of progressives who act like life only became shitty for the very first time ever when Trump got elected. He knows it has been shit for decades. He’s especially sick of idiots on either side of the aisle who actually like and trust politicians.

Saying you like Hilary because she is a straight shooter is the equivalent to saying that Tom Cruise is down to earth. In that same vein, anyone who says that Donald Trump “stands for us” is delusional.

Continuing in his rant, DeRosa explains that everything is a hustle. We’re paying tons of money for shit because the stuff that is cheaper is “utter shit.” First class is the perfect example. Compared to coach, (“utter shit”) first class seems luxurious. It’s the same idea with the weekend. So many Americans toil five days a week at jobs they hate and then get so excited for the weekend, which is just two measly days where you get to do what you want while hungover.

Next up on DeRosa’s shit list is Hollywood. Hollywood isn’t actually committed to meaningful diversity. Halle Berry was championed as the first black woman to win the Best Actress winner but she’s half black. Obama was championed as the first black president but he’s half black.⁶ Instead of creating new, diverse comic book characters, they just change the races and sexual identities of old ones. Diversity is just something Hollywood says they believe in but they don’t actually mean it or take meaningful action toward creating diversity. But we all stupidly gobble it up, believe in the hustle, and congratulate Hollywood for taking steps toward such meaningful change.

Throughout his rant, DeRosa builds step by step upon his theory for why life is so shitty. There is no unity and there is no unity because everyone is a bully. He is well aware of this because social media has been a big part of being a comedian for the past decade and he has had a front row seat to the bullying.

This is when I Never Promised You A Rose Garden really starts to sing.⁷

DeRosa has been in the middle of a few social media rage maelstroms over the past couple of years, in particular with cyclists and nurses.

Nurses hate Joe DeRosa.

Why?

Recently DeRosa filmed a half hour for comedy central where, in one bit, he trashed nurses. Inspired by his mom’s recent experience in a hospital, he pointed out how little you actually see your doctor when you’re in a hospital, argued that nurses kill people, and wondered where the concept of hot nurses came from because he has never seen one. It’s hyperbolic invective.

If you watch the live special during the nurses bit, the audience is laughing and having a blast. There is no outrage to be seen.⁸ But when it came time to create a 30 second clip⁹ of the nurses bit for social media, as comics have to do in order to stay relevant and sell tickets to live shows, well, the nurse backlash was nuclear.

As it often happens when short comedy clips get posted to social media for the entire world¹⁰ to see, vital context is lost. People who aren’t comedy fans take the bits entirely seriously as though a politician is giving a speech and the context of the bit as existing to elicit laughter during a comedy show that people bought tickets to for the sole purpose of hearing jokes is forgotten.

Indeed, nurses started tweeting all kinds of awful stuff to DeRosa and nursing twitter and TikTok rallied in universal DeRosa condemnation. Nurses even posted fake yelp reviews of DeRosa’s NYC bar¹¹, falsely claiming the food had roaches in it.

And, worst of all in my view, they put up a cringey petition to remove his videos and have him issue a formal apology.

Meanwhile, cops, who DeRosa also trashes in this bit (“You know what female cops look like? Male cops”) didn’t care at all.

DeRosa spends the next few minutes talking about his back and forth with nurses on social media after these clips were posted. He says he has learned some important lessons, namely that there actually are A LOT of hot nurses. He then goes through their complaints one by one, feigning sympathy for their concerns, and then landing glorious misdirection punchline after glorious misdirection punchline about why their concerns are wrong. My favorite involved nurses whining that they work way longer hours than doctors and do all of the hard work, Joe DeRosa agreeing, and then defending hierarchy generally. “Of course because hierarchy exists. Does the foreman go to the worksite and haul the bricks?”

DeRosa ends the show talking about an interaction he got into with the guy running the @salsawindfall account on Twitter, the fan account for DeRosa’s band named — you guessed it —Salsa Windfall. People would regularly message that account, logically assuming that DeRosa ran it, since the account does have the most obvious Twitter handle for the band. And the guy would reply to twitter DMs as though he was Joe DeRosa. DeRosa asked him to stop. The guy kept pretending to be him and DeRosa persisted in asking him to stop. This came to a head when the guy tweeted an April Fools’ joke that Salsa Windfall had broken up, leading to tons of DMs to DeRosa’s personal account. DeRosa ultimately DMed him a nice message, emphasizing that he genuinely appreciated his fandom, was talking to him human to human and hoping he would see his side. It was poignant, thoughtful, redemptive, mature, and kind. And then, at the end of the message, DeRosa wrote one final statement I won’t spoil here because he hasn’t filmed this hour yet and you still have the chance to see it live. Anyway, you might be able to guess the content based on the fact that the guy promptly blocked him.

For us comedy fans, it was a truly heartwarming ending. Let me explain myself…

As DeRosa noted at the top of this new hour, social media is a necessary part of a comic’s life now. Comics need social media to stay relevant, hype their shit and most importantly, to sell tickets to live shows, which are a comic’s lifeblood. So social media will necessarily shape comics’ acts. The question is how.

If you see this DeRosa hour, I believe you will leave convinced that social media has a positive impact on comedy. Not with me?

I started this essay talking about anger. Anger is comics’ food.¹² Every good joke is built on a foundation of rage. Comics are always looking for new material and so they always have to make sure their rage is at sufficient levels. Not finding rage in everyday life? Social media is always there. As we all know, righteous indignation exists in spades on social media. But it’s not real rage. No one would act person to person in real life they way that they behave with one another behind a screen. Remember that everyone in the audience was laughing at DeRosa’s nurse bit while he was is doing it live. There wasn’t an angry face to be found. Yet nurses on the internet were incensed.

But this isn’t real, meaningful anger that deserves to be taken seriously. None of these people go to comedy clubs. None of these people speak blurty. None of these people understand the context and good intent and the surrender-your-I-am-here-to- get -offended spirit that exists in any atmosphere where these jokes would actually be told.

Yet DeRosa and pretty much ever comic out there chooses to engage with these social media people directly.¹³ He not only reads the comments. He responds to them. Hell, he writes ten minute chunks of material about interacting with these people. And it isn’t just DeRosa; he is far from being the only comic to use his interactions with people on social media for material.¹⁴

The fear is that by living in this social media world and consistently interacting with angry non-blurty speakers online, comics are going to walk out on stage always hyperaware of the angry not-comedy-show-attending-never-spoken-a-word-of-blurty-in-their-life-mob that will inevitably await them when out of context clips get posted to social media in a few months. This awareness will lead comics to changing their material to avoid the social media backlash. They will be so hyperaware of how every angle of their material could offend someone that they will write material in fear. The comedy club as a refuge would be destroyed. The comic as the sole real life truth teller who gets to be truly honest would be gone. The online opinions of those who have never gone to a comedy show in their life would change the art form and render the comedy club as stodgy and serious a place as fucking everywhere else.

So as DeRosa was telling the story about the sweet note he was writing to the guy impersonating him on Twitter, I was starting to get worried the special was going to end with DeRosa learning from the rage mobs. As so many Netflix “comedy” specials have ended lately, was DeRosa gearing up to say he has learned to be more sensitive, that his words do hurt people, that he should take some time to listen, etc etc etc? Go see the hour live and I think you will breathe a sigh of relief.

DeRosa isn’t here to engage in hugging and learning. He’s a comic and he is here for the jokes. He is using social media to fuel his own rage, gobble it up, write material, shit out that rage in your rose garden, post the clips, and then feast on some yummy yummy social media anger when he needs more material.

And this native blurty speaker right here couldn’t be happier about it.

Other Bullshit:

1 I fucking warned you.

2 Bill Burr and Joe DeRosa together is my favorite podcast coupling. The rebooted Uninformed episodes from 2019 are incredible. Burr accusing DeRosa of walking 15 blocks to yell at Occupy Wall Street protestors and repeatedly mischaracterizing his position while DeRosa gets increasingly incensed is the funniest thing I have heard on any podcast ever. (It starts at about the 22 minute mark of episode 2.) Burr/DeRosa 2024, baby.

3 The Taste Buds podcast he does with fellow comic, Sal Vulcano, is built entirely around this premise. In any given Taste Buds episode, Sal and DeRosa pit two entirely innocuous food items against each other (hummus vs. chip dip, gummy bears vs. nerds, hot sandwich vs. cold sandwich, etc) pick one to advocate for, and yell at each other about them for an hour.

4 I saw I Never Promised You A Rose Garden on Sunday, April 2nd at what I consider to be my home comedy club, the Comedy Vault, in Batavia, IL.

5 “Of course I drink. Of course I take Prozac. Of course I have gone to therapy. Life is brutal” is canonical DeRosa.

6 OK, Obama isn’t a Hollywood figure. But he kind of is, right?

7 That said, my favorite part of this hour is Joe DeRosa’s defense of evil and how great things come from evil (gangster rap, 1970s films, and half-time speeches). But limits on my intelligence, creativity, and writing ability rendered me incapable of working a discussion of this material into this essay.

8 To be fair, this is like saying there are no Cincinnati Bengals fans at the St. Louis Blues hockey game. Why would there be? People who get outraged by stuff aren’t the kind of folks buying tickets to check out the comedy show on Saturday night. And, if one of those people accidentally wanders in, no comedy special is going to showcase outrage happening during the show. Any highlighting of any audience member during a comedy special is happening to show you see how much fun people have at comedy shows? You really should buy tickets and go to one yourself. Comedy specials, unless they are some kind of unique live event, are quite deliberately edited, and even the unique live event variety is manned by sophisticated camera operators who are trained to only focus on audience members who are laughing. So really my statement above is pretty stupid^a because if there had been genuine nurse outrage during the live taping, we wouldn’t know about it.

^a But… I have been to many a live comedy show and never once seen someone walk out due to rage at the nature of what the comic was discussing. Sure people do walk out of comedy shows because they are pissed about the topics being discussed. Indeed, DeRosa talked about nurses occasionally doing this during his shows. But this is not a common occurrence and when it happens, it’s less than 1% of the audience. Angry mobs don’t form during live comedy shows. When you see people laughing and having fun during a taped comedy special, what you see is really close to what it is actually like to be at a live comedy show. The beauty of a comedy show is that it is a voluntary choice to attend one and so getting angry that comedy is happening in front of you makes you the asshole.

9 Clipping has become the bane of, at least some, and I suspect the majority of comics’ existence. To sell tickets, comics feel the need to post regular 30 second clips of them doing live comedy to their social media channels. These mini commercials for the comic’s live act say I am funny and you should come see me live. If you are a crowd work guy,^a no problem. All of your clips are of you asking members of the audience questions and saying something hilarious in return so you don’t burn material in your act. (You can show the social media world how funny it is to make fun of yourself for thinking the couple in the front row were brother and sister but you don’t want to be the hack who posts material to social media and then does that same joke live.) If you aren’t a crowd work guy, identifying material for clips requires more creativity. If you have a podcast, you can post clips from that.^b Otherwise, you have to dig back in the vault and post clips of previous specials, which obviously get repetitive after a while, do tons of local material (“Boy Cleveland sucks, right?”), learn how to do crowd work, or something.^c Whatever you decide to do, it has become a fact of life that regular clipping is essential to selling tickets and your social media game is important to your success in the comedy business.

^aJessica Kirson is a fucking killer. I consume way too much live comedy and of the countless number of shows I have been to, I have never once seen someone tear apart a room quite the way Jessica Kirson does. Usually during a live show, at least 5-10% of the show just isn’t feeling it. That’s fine. Tastes differ. Not every joke is going to hit with every individual in the audience. Unless you’re Jessica Kirson. No one is safe in a room with her. She will murder everyone. Jessica Kirson’s career is really is taking off and she’s finally getting the theater dates she deserves and it is because of the success of her crowd work clips on social media. If Jessica is in your city and you don’t see her live, you hate laughing and you’re a shitty person.

^b Stavros is both a crowd work and a podcast guy so he is a clipping machine. It’s no coincidence that his career is exploding.

^cMy favorite “or something” ever is Raanan Hershberg’s anti-crowd-work material (“I don’t care about your jobs or your lives”). I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for this performance and the reason Raanan was forced into doing crowd work when he isn’t a crowd work guy is that this was a late-night crowd work only set Big Jay Oakerson was headlining for his last show of the weekend at Zanies in Chicago. Raanan was opening for Louis CK that night (yes, we were at that show too) and popped in at Zanies after the Louis show.

10 The entire world is a vastly different audience from a comedy show audience, the latter of which is the coolest group of people you can find on planet Earth. A comedy club is a different planet with its own rules. Norms and basic social laws that exist in every other situation don’t apply inside the hallowed halls of the comedy club. Once you pass through the doors of a comedy club, there is an implied understanding that you are in a zone of radical free speech. But, just as important, there is an implied understanding of good intent. Comics aren’t there to offend you; they are there to make you laugh. A comic’s intention is as complex and as simple as that one principle. Comics aren’t politicians. Comics aren’t CEOs. Comics aren’t the VP of Diversity. Comics. Aren’t. Serious. Comics live to make jokes and whenever they can find something funny to say, regardless of what political angle it comes from, they’ll say it. Killing is their currency. Comedy audiences understand these principles deep in their bones and act accordingly. The rest of the world doesn’t.

80% Personal Confession/20% (at best) Helpful Context Of the Comedy Club Atmosphere

This is why the only room full of strangers where I ever feel really comfortable is a comedy club. Statements uttered in a comedy club are almost always taken the right away. The assumption of ill-intent that is so prevalent in the real world is necessarily surrendered immediately upon entering the comedy club. And with ill-intent surrendered, every interaction in the comedy club is transformed into an interaction where good intent is presumed. Radical honesty, bluntness, and the strong impulse to say the thing everyone is thinking but no one is wiling to say out loud, are my native methods of communicating. My husband has officially deemed me a “blurter” for communicating like this. He’s not wrong. I guess the way I think about it is that “blurty” is also the native language of the comedy club. That’s why a comic can come on stage, see the mixed race couple in the front row, and ask the black guy how it is “fucking that white chick” and everyone laughs instead of getting offended. It’s a statement that is entirely appropriate and entertaining in the context of a comedy club but wildly inappropriate outside of one. My belief is that stand up comedy is the only 100% honest, authentic method of communication. So I believe that comics, more than any other person in the world, get to communicate more honestly a higher percentage of the time than other types of people. That’s why comics love hanging out with other comics so much.

When you are lucky, outside of the comedy club, you might find a few native blurty speakers, or at least, a few people fluent in blurty. If you’re unlucky, and you often will be, the spaces in this world are occupied mostly by people who haven’t learned a word of blurty and if you speak blurty to them, they’ll look at you as if you spoke Ancient Greek, Latin, or any other language no reasonable person would think any other person should know a word of, let alone speak out loud.

I think I can speak for most regular live comedy show goers when I say that the comedy club for us is a direly needed refuge from the priggish, staid, overly serious real world we find ourselves regularly fumbling, censoring, and faking our way through^a. So when a joke that a comic tells in a comedy club — where the native language is blurty and if you don’t speak blurty and get offended, you’re the asshole — gets clipped on social media and a whole world of people who don’t speak a word of blurty see this clip, you can imagine how their outrage comes across to those of us who are native blurty speakers and consider the comedy club our safe sanctuary.

^a Yeah, so I am probably right about the refuge thing but the difficulty with constant self-censorship in the regular world probably applies only to me.

11 We patronized DeRosa’s bar during our New York trip last November and it was wonderful and very Joe DeRosa (lots of horror movie posters and video games about). We did not see one roach. We did have several very boozy and inexpensive negronis.

12 This phrase and the main takeaway from this essay I stole from David Foster Wallace. In his 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram, Wallace explains why fiction writers love watching television. “Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers…because human situations are writers’ food,” he writes and as much as writers love observing, they hate being observed. TV gives them the opportunity to watch without being watched but the problem is that TV is fake. No one on TV is actually unobserved. In fact, TV actors are, of course, aware that they are being observed by millions. So fiction writers, turning to TV for their dose of human observation, feel like they are getting that dose but they aren’t really because the humans they are observing are all performing for them. No genuine human behavior is being observed at all.

Comics are turning to social media in the same way that fiction writers turn to TV. Just as fiction writers rely on human observation to write so comics rely on anger to come up with new jokes. Because they can get an unlimited supply of anger on social media, comics too often go there for just that purpose. Just as television is a fake and poor substitute for real human observation so social media is a fake source of rage. Social media is full of people who don’t speak a word of blurty getting outraged by short clips spoken solely in blurty. It’s fake rage.

13 Why? Why interact with these people directly? Why even bother with personally posting to social media at all? Louis CK, for instance, ops out of personally going on social media entirely, and his ticket sales are doing fine. CK deleted twitter long ago and he has an official instagram account but he pays someone to run it so he doesn’t have to interact with people himself. And he’s still finding plenty of rage sources. He is as funny as he has ever been right now. ^a Joe Rogan repeats often that he posts to social media but never looks at the comments. Clearly, comics don’t have to interact with people on social media if they don’t want to.

Of course, if DeRosa didn’t interact with the nurses on twitter, we wouldn’t have this great bit so I am glad he does but why does he choose to? He obviously has the self-control not to as he admits in this hour. (When his mom or the only guy in Pennsylvania who drinks expresses support for Trump, DeRosa stuffs it down to get along. “Oh really, a 75 year old Italian lady doesn’t agree with my political beliefs? How shocking.”) Why not stuff it down with the social media people? I think it’s proof of my point that DeRosa is using social media in a healthy way as an anger source for new material.

^a Ironically, CK talks about YouTube in this bit.

14 Ricky Gervais, Michelle Wolf, Brian Posehn (he talks about this live in his latest act), just to name a few I came up with in 20 seconds of thinking about it.