"I Had So Much Fun During the Pandemic"
Joe Rogan and Donnell Rawlings fondly recall the first year of the pandemic.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast yesterday, the comedian Donnell Rawlings gave an interesting firsthand account of the Dave Chappelle-led crew of comedians that roamed the country—well, namely Yellow Springs, Ohio and Austin, Texas—performing comedy shows in packed venues between the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2021, when it was finally felled by the coronavirus, at that point still novel. Transcript below and discussion to follow:
Rogan: When we were doing those lockdown shows—whoo, that was fun.
Rawlings: Man. Yo, it was so—
Rogan: That was wild times.
Rawlings: It was already—we already have a community. We all have mutual respect for each other, but the thing that made that so special—wasn’t nobody doing this shit.
Rogan: Right.
Rawlings: That's what made—one thing about the pandemic, it made you appreciate life a lot more than before the pandemic.
Rogan: Yeah. It made you appreciate freedom.
Rawlings: Freedom.
"People was like this: 'Oh, it must be nice to have rich friends that have testing machines.' I was like, 'You're absolutely right. It is. It's beautiful. It is the most amazing ever.'
Rogan: The ability to do shows. Remember we did those shows outside and everybody was wearing a mask? It was so stupid. And they all got tested too?
Rawlings: I had so much fun during the pandemic. I was almost embarrassed to show the pictures I wanted to show, like faceless shit. Yo—
Rogan: No mask.
Rawlings: We would take pictures and people was like this, "Look at him. He could kill my grandmother." I'm like, "All right, first of all." You did it. Dave did. I was like—people was like this: "Oh, it must be nice to have rich friends that have testing machines." I was like, "You're absolutely right. It is. It's beautiful. It is the most amazing ever."
Dave Chappelle raped my nose for two summers in a row when we were doing the shows in the cornfields and shit. But this is what people don't understand. He took the opportunity—that village of Yellow Springs, he made it as safe as it could be. Any place we would go, hotels there, everybody had an opportunity to get tested. And I remember this was very interesting when the bubble, we did this with Bob Saget, RIP. We were doing these shows and I think that before Bob passed away, when he came out to Yellow Springs and was hanging out with Dave and us and everything, it gave him some incentive to want to go back on the road to do it. He just got really excited about doing it again.
"They called it Covid Row, because we had the whole floor locked down. And everybody in our team got it, but it felt like a old school chicken pox party."
We did like 55 shows. The summer was over. The run was clear. We had no positives or anything. Dave extended the show another week, and that week was when the bubble popped. And now everybody is freaking out like, "Oh my God." These same women, people was coming out there when they was getting flown out in jets. They weren't getting trafficked, but Dave created an environment. He wanted his friends around. We was going to restaurants. We would have the whole spot. We was just doing all this stuff. Nobody was thinking about the possible consequences of that.
And I remember this one girl was like, "Oh my God, I don't even know why I'm here." Then I looked at Dave, I was like, "Yo, man. Damn. We almost made it, man, through." He was like, "Donnell, it is going to be okay." He said, "You gotta realize this is the reason why we test." When we first got our first positive, had we not been testing it could have been crazy.
Rogan: And we got a first positive because dudes went to do somebody else's podcast and they didn't test. Remember that?
Rawlings: Yeah. I remember that. That was—
Rogan: Yeah.
Rawlings: I remember that because... I remember that scene. It was so funny. Yeah. That was here.
Rogan: Yeah.
Rawlings: And it was like, something was different, because we had one positive. And you remember that backstage used to be packed out, right?
Rogan: Yeah.
Rawlings: It started getting lower and lower, right?
Rogan: Yeah.
Rawlings: It was basically like me, Cipha Sounds, somebody else was in the green room, right? And then Big Jay came, that's one of my friends, good friends. Big Jay came back and he had this look on his face like, "It's over, right?" He came in there and I looked, I said, "Boss man got it." He's like, "Yep." Right? And another thing, Dave could've did—this is why I respect his character. At that time, he could've just been in the mask, went on stage, went back out. He canceled the show. But the funniest shit, it's a whole—at Stubbs, room is sold out and then Cena comes back. And Cena was like, "I need you to go out there and tell people that the show is canceled." Right?
"Dave created an environment. He wanted his friends around. We was going to restaurants. We would have the whole spot. We was just doing all this stuff. Nobody was thinking about the possible consequences of that."
I say, "You don't need me to do that shit, n—a." Because the minute... It is one thing, if I go out there, people going to be like, "Show's starting." Right? And as a comedian, I'm not gonna not tell jokes. And then I'm be like, "Oh yeah, Dave, not going to show up." The crazy thing about that, everybody at the LINE Hotel, they was making jokes, Joe. They called it Covid Row, because we had the whole floor locked down. And everybody in our team got it, but it felt like a old school chicken pox party. You know what I'm saying?
Rogan: Right.
Rawlings: We got it. We got it. What I tell you, man, what we did, everything was like, "Okay, make sure you had your vitamins," all that type of shit. But the beauty of it was we was like—people was testing out like eight or nine days, so we thought we was gonna leave. After a while, I was like, "Wait a minute, the next room was gonna be in 10 days." And for some reason everybody went back to being negative. We closed, did more shows and we got the fuck up out of here. But it was a beautiful time, man. Beautiful time.
Rogan: It was a beautiful time. It was a fun time.
Rawlings: What a time to be alive. Yep.
Rogan: It was a fun time.
The first thing that strikes me about this segment is how fondly they recall the period in question: it was a fun time, a wild time, a beautiful time, a time of community and mutual respect. Let us set aside the fact that it was also a time when thousands of people were dying every week, and let us set aside the curious notion that these guys came to appreciate their freedom during a period in which they moved more freely than almost anyone else in the world. What gets me about their nostalgia is that Rogan has spent the last six years decrying the early days of the pandemic as a time of unprecedented repression that forever changed the world. In a 2024 episode with Tim Dillon, he complained that the lockdowns and mandates caused divorces, suicides, breakups, drug addictions, vaccine injuries and early deaths caused by the jab. In 2025 he told Duncan Trussell that the lockdowns "broke a lot of people psychologically," a breakage compounded by the fact that "most people were required to get vaccinated… it made us more tense and more shitty." In that same episode he contrasted 2020 with 2016, which he described as “a fun time… And then when 2020 came around, man, and they started having those George Floyd riots and they were lighting cop cars in LA, I was like, oookay. This is where we’re going. We’re going in this direction.” That’s a stark contrast with the way he spoke yesterday; it’s almost as if the “lockdowns” didn’t affect him at all, and his commentary on that period is a refraction of his ideological priors and the media he consumes.
The second thing that strikes me about this segment is the pair’s failure to consider that if they got Covid at these shows, perhaps their audiences, who didn’t have the resources they had, got it too. But that's par for the course with these guys.
The third thing that strikes me is Rogan's disdain for the health precautions that allowed him and his friends to justify living this way: "It was all so stupid. And they all got tested too?" he says derisively, moments before blaming the outbreak on comics who didn't test before going on a podcast. You may remember that at the time, Rogan tested all of his podcast guests courtesy of an expensive medical concierge service that used antibody tests unapproved by the FDA.
Ashwin Rodrigues
The fourth thing that strikes me is how this outbreak played out at the time. As I wrote in January 2021, Chappelle announced that he tested positive for Covid and canceled the shows in question. He did not disclose that anyone else in his circle tested positive, let alone the entire crew. It was Rogan who revealed that particular detail a week later, in an episode of his podcast with Brendan Schaub. He also revealed that he had recently gone to a different show “with several people that wound up getting Covid.” Then he and Schaub discussed how careless people were about Covid in Texas and Florida:
Schaub: You should see Florida.
Rogan: Yeah, oh, I know.
Schaub: Dude, I did a show for New Year’s Eve, I walked out and there’s, it was just everyone's together, and I come out, I’m like “Do you guys not get the news? Like, listen, I’m pretty loosey-goosey, but this is ridiculous.” And I see a guy making out with two chicks in the front, I go, “Hey, hold on, stop. Do you know each other?” Like, “No.” I'm like, “What the fuck you doing, man?”
Rogan: They're not worried about it.
Schaub: No, they don’t care, man.
Recall too that there was no Paxlovid in January 2021, no widely available vaccines, and monoclonal antibodies had just been authorized as a treatment a few months earlier; hence the mention of “vitamins” in the Rawlings segment. (And in the Schaub segment, where Rogan says you can treat Covid with an antioxidant supplement). These guys were risking their lives every time they performed, plus the lives of their audiences, their audiences’ families, and the ever-expanding circles of every worker they came into contact with at clubs, restaurants, and hotels.
A fun, beautiful time indeed:
Rawlings: …Every show we had, there was no room for being okay. You had to be on your game every time.
Rogan: Yeah, it was good times. It was a good time. Well, that was when all that Covid shit went down with me, when CNN turned my face green, that was because of a Nashville show that we were doing that we had to cancel.That's what that was. Yeah, we were supposed to do a show that weekend and I got Covid the previous weekend. I was doing an arena with Tony in Florida and I got Covid in Florida and then I made that video on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. It was like the third day after I got Covid where I got over it and I was like, I feel fine, but we have to cancel the shows this weekend. And that's when all the shit went down. I took Ivermectin. That was those arena shows.
Rawlings: Oh, I remember that. "Oh, he has the answer [to] everything." Yo, if he don't have the answer, at least he's fucking trying to find it. It's so interesting—
Rogan: Well, whether or not I had the answer, the crazy thing is I was better. I was already better and they turned my face green on CNN. But we got to see how crazy the media really is. They didn't want to hear nothing but "you have to take this vaccine."
Rawlings: And you had to do that.
Rogan: And if you didn't take this vaccine, you're a part of the problem.
Rawlings: I just don't—as devastating as that time was. I'm just, how is it just fucking over now? Is it herd immunity? How is it just like it almost—
Rogan: It's herd immunity. Yeah. It's also everybody who got it got it. You got immunity because of it. And then also whatever variants are still left, they're significantly diminished. That's how viruses generally—
Rawlings: It's like a cold strand now, right?
Rogan: Yes. Well, that's how viruses generally go. They become more transmissible but less potent over time. Yeah, and that's what happened.
Rawlings: I'm gonna to tell you, there was a time, though, man, I even said, man, maybe it was just something about how people got along with each other—I was like, we should do once a year, just have a week of just lockdown. Yo, just so you can get into—man, I—
Rogan: It makes you appreciate freedom, that's for sure.
Rawlings: It made me appreciate nature, bro. I bought a fucking house in Yellow Spring because I was like, you know what, trees, woods—I don't know if the streets can handle this, but I became a bird watcher, bro. I watched birds. I watched birds. Do you know what that does to my street credit?
Let’s put a pin in that “I bought a fucking house” bit for a later discussion at a later date about how so many comedians in this crowd profiteered off the pandemic. For now, let’s just consider the above exchange in light of Rogan’s 2025 conversation with Ron White, when White described performing multiple shows in Vegas while actively sicker than he’d ever been with Covid:
Rogan: I thought the new Covid was total bullshit. I thought it was like a baby cold.
White: I had—my girlfriend raised two kids and she said she's never seen anybody puke as much as I did for two days.
Rogan: Wow.
White: And it was brutal. It was just bile and I don't even know if I've ever been that sick. [Unintelligible] that part of it a couple of days.
Rogan: That's interesting. I wonder if you got multiple things at the same time. Do people usually puke a lot if they get Covid? Jamie, do you know?
Jamie: I don't remember that being a symptom.
Rogan: I don't remember having that either. You might've had a couple things at the same time. Because there was a bad flu going around too.
[…]
White: I felt loose and good. I played really good golf and then I got there and it started catching up with me. I had my girlfriend, I'm staying in the mansion down at MGM Grand, which is pretty sweet. I had that show just on Saturday. we got there on Wednesday and I'm like, "fuck it, I'm not going to make it." I felt it all starting to deteriorate. So I called this doctor—
Rogan: God, it was so bad you didn't think you were going to make it on Saturday?
White: I thought I would need another shot of steroids. So I called the doctor, had the hotel call a doctor, and I thought I was getting the doctor that was whatever it takes to get through the show. But that's not the doctor I got. The doctor I got was, "Let's test you for Covid." I'm like, "No, no, I don't have Covid." He said, "I won't charge you if it's negative," which didn't make any sense to me. And I said, "well, okay."
And then it came up positive for Covid and he said, "see there, the T and the X and the thing?" And I said, "yeah, I see it. Let's do it again because I don't think I have Covid." So we did it again. Came up positive again. Not only would he not give me the Covid shot, he told me to quit taking the antibiotics I was already on and he did nothing except for call the CDC to tell them I had Covid. And they both said, "You cannot do the show." I'm like, "Wait a minute, you're the wrong doctor. I don't want the fucking 'retire today' shit, I want the "your drummer's a junkie, he's out of heroin. get him some fucking something to get him through this goddamn show.'"
[…]
Rogan: If you told me—you did tell me you had Covid, and I gave you a big hug on Monday. I saw you on Monday when we did Kill Tony.
White: Right. And that was fine.
Rogan: [Joking] You were a super spreader on Kill Tony. You son of a bitch.
White: Big time. I'm an asshole. The biggest asshole ever. It would be so horrible—
Rogan: Nobody got sick! Nobody got sick.
White: I know. Nobody did. It's fucking—it wasn't until the next day that I got sick, that's when the vomiting started. Wasn't in Vegas. It was day two. It was Tuesday after Kill Tony. That's when I got sick. And it was fucking awful. I mean, for two days. Just awful.
That was less than a year ago.
