Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?

Someone is talking to you. Or is he talking to himself ? A deep, spacey voice with pondering pauses and a resinous Louisiana accent. “There’s this trick,” the voice says. “That’s the devil out there … That’s Satan, baby. That’s Lucifer, bruh. That’s Lucifer, that darkness sniffer.” Your whole life, it goes on; “you think, Oh, I’ll, I’ll just keep judging, keeping people at a distance … But then I get to the end of my life and I’ll realize, You know what? I didn’t win anything by doing that. That was a trick. And the only thing I won was being alone.”

Theo Von is not a preacher. Not officially. Officially, he’s a comedian with a podcast. But unofficially, he’ll take you right there, into that biblical light, into the hell-chasm and the soul in its solitude and the benevolent rays of the divine. “The Lord lurks where the devil jerks,” Von says. And if he could get the devil onto his podcast—if he could land a two-hour download with Lucifer, that darkness sniffer, that snorter of lines of uncut night—he probably would.

Von’s This Past Weekend is huge. It’s currently the eighth-most-popular podcast in America, sandwiched between This American Life and The Ben Shapiro Show. No. 1 is of course The Joe Rogan Experience, where the bros burble for hours on end. Where cigars are smoked and theories are floated. Von has been on Rogan’s show multiple times, and while This Past Weekend is fully inside the Rogan algorithm—partaking of the same vibe of heady masculinity and unsanctioned speech; tapping the same world of canceled professors, polar plungers, hungover stand-ups, supplement salesmen, moonlighting mystics, grifting neuroscientists, and gleaming mixed-martial-arts warriors (and wouldn’t the ultimate Rogan guest be all of the above?)—it’s also … different.

[Read: I tried to live like Joe Rogan]

Theodor Capitani von Kurnatowski III grew up in Covington, Louisiana, and showbiz-wise he came up the hard way: multiple seasons on MTV’s reality series Road Rules and its spin-offs, acting roles here and there, gigs hosting an online TV-recap show and a hidden-camera show, and a lot of stand-up, including an appearance on Last Comic Standing. Plenty of time to hone a character, or a persona. Plenty of time to screw it up completely. But although authenticity is the biggest shtick of all, Von, at 44—mulleted, surreally affable—does seem to have grown into himself. Kevin Nealon, on his YouTube show, Hiking With Kevin, asked Von back in 2019 about his Louisiana accent. “For a long time I tried to pretend like I didn’t have one,” Von replied, “ ’cause I was trying to fit in … That was the devil’s decoy right there.”

This Past Weekend is different from The Joe Rogan Experience because Von is different. For a start, he also interviews quote-unquote regular people—a mortician, a plumber, a female truck driver. Then there’s the religion thing: a spirituality, freely accessed in his conversations and monologues, that mixes the gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous (he’s struggled with addiction himself) with his background in southern Christianity. He responds to calls from on-the-ropes alcoholics, and from someone worried that his friend is doing too much meth. He offers them, by and large, thoughtful advice and—much more important—the sensation of brotherhood. “Man, I know that tiredness, brother. I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired of feeling alone … I’m tired of also not even being there for myself. I mean, that’s the loneliest, bro, when you don’t even have yourself.”

And then there’s Von’s brain, which is very different. Von muses beatifically. He has little visions. How to describe the experience of listening to him riff ? It’s fast and slow: You’re caught in a sort of languidly blooming stoner-y revelation, but with brilliant scintillas of poetry zipping around at light speed in the foreground. “Like somebody in the fuckin’, like, great beyond pressed a fuckin’ doorbell that you didn’t know was connected to you.” That, according to Von, is how it feels to get Tasered. And this is how it feels to be on the hallucinogenic drug DMT: “It’s like God hit you with a mirror. But he hit you hard and he hit you fast. And the cops showed up.”

With Von, I went on a bit of a journey. His two Netflix comedy specials—Regular People and No Offense—left me cold. Stalking around with that twangy stand-up energy, overdoing his accent and making jokes about Denny’s waitresses being ugly: I wasn’t into it. I didn’t laugh.

[From the November 2023 issue: Comedians only care about comedy]

Then, as I got deeper into This Past Weekend and his hazy backwoods conservatism swam into view—his hazy backwoods conservatism that sharpens now and again into early-onset Trumpism—I had a political panic. Von chats with Tucker Carlson, Putin’s ass-kisser. With Jordan Peterson, he laments the loss of national pride (“There’s some infection in America”). To the rapper-producer Logic, he says this: “I think there’s a lot of men out there who are gay not even because they wanna be; its ’cause they—all the straightness got jerked out of ’em over time by looking at pornography.” (“Wait, what?” Logic yelps. “Wait, what?! … Bro, if somebody wants to be fucking gay, they’re just gay!”) UFC President Dana White comes on the podcast, talking about his friendship with Donald Trump (“I’m having breakfast with him tomorrow!”). And the endless jokes about homeless people, and the endless hang-on-was-that-racist? … Goddammit, I said to myself. Theo’s a shill. He’s a sinister vector of reactionary bullshit. He’s a licensed fool in the court of Steve Bannon.

But this, I decided, is a category error. Von’s speculations exist in a weightless comedic space—and it’s kind of a Trumpy space, carnivalesque, semi-appalling, in poor taste, but that’s just where we’re at right now. The joke has hollowed us out. Von’s got a bit, a reverie—it’s like an early George Saunders story—about how pretty soon we’ll all be Uber drivers, and the only way we’ll be able to get a fare is to force another Uber driver, at gunpoint, to become our passenger. “Do you feel like we could really end up in our lifetime as heading to a revolution?” he asked the comedian Shane Gillis on This Past Weekend. “Or some sort of a place where … it all topples over … We’re kinda gettin’ there, it feels like.” The baseline of Von’s humor is catastrophic—or post-catastrophic, like the crack-up’s already happened and all we have are these damaged thought processes, these whirling daydreams and one-liners.

Interviewing Wayne Owen, a retired sanitation worker from Staten Island, Von becomes fixated on the Fresh Kills Landfill—closed in 2001, and now greened-over—and on an official whose job it is to control the local deer population. “So they’re doing animal vasectomy out there on the landfill?” he asks wonderingly. And you hear a faint chiming in his brain, the sound of comedy starting to happen, Theo Von poetry. “That fuckin’ nut Grinch,” he says. “Sperm Dexter. That dude’s out there fuckin’ clippin’ bucks.”

When Von is on, he’s unstoppable: His recent conversation/two-hour improv jag with the comedian Tim Dillon is so brutally hilarious, such a flaming, atrocious summit of the American Absurd, I had to pull my car over and sit there, weeping with laughter and relief.

So Von’s a man of the Now. Mentally, he’s in his own place, but his powers of connection are considerable. People open up to him. And like America, he’s on the cusp: In one future, I can see him doing bits at a right-wing rally, getting big laughs from the goons with his nonwokery—at which point he ceases, obviously, to be funny. In another, he carries his strange (but massive) constituency of fiends, seekers, truthers, strugglers, and comedy nuts—the strange planet that is his audience—to somewhere new, somewhere genius, somewhere out there beyond the current paradigm. In that scenario, we hear his voice, and we begin to heal ourselves.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?”