Brutal history as comedy fuel: Rome, Vikings, sewage and Paperclip

The Short Version

Put comedians in a room with Joe Rogan and they end up in the darkest parts of the past surprisingly often: Nero's cruelty, Vikings flinging diseased rats over city walls, girls taken from their homes as human shields in Nazi-occupied Crete, carts of human waste in 1870s New York, Nazi rocket scientists quietly shipped to Alabama [1][3][4]. Some of these comics have made it their job. Yannis Pappas and Chris DiStefano host History Hyenas, Felipe Esparza has a comedy-history podcast, and Kurt Metzger wears covert-operation names on T-shirts like band merch [1][2][3]. Across four conversations the same two uses of history keep showing up. The filth and cruelty of the past make modern complaints look small, and they reveal how thin civilization is. And the strange detours (Churchill's plan to arm German prisoners against the Soviets, a court dwarf served to a queen inside a pie, a Satanist running a rocket lab) are close to perfect comedy material, because the truth is already more absurd than any premise a writer could invent [1][2][4]. The comics are open that they aren't historians, and some of their stories are hearsay. What they add is a way of looking at history, not a set of verified facts.

Table of contents

What They Said

Yannis Pappas and Chris DiStefano: "history is a story"

The History Hyenas bring their show's specialty to the Rogan studio: the most lurid and brutal corners of the past, told with maximum irreverence [1]. They go through Nero castrating and then marrying a slave boy and prowling the streets in disguise to beat people up, Alexander the Great's undefeated record, Vikings reportedly flinging diseased rats over city walls, and a Revolutionary War letter describing Hessian mercenaries mutilating enemy soldiers [1]. They also recount a Papua New Guinea tribe's disturbing boyhood initiation rituals, and the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, who a journalist believes was killed and eaten by the Asmat people [1].

They are frank about their method. "We don't do it wrong. We just are amateur historian enthusiasts," one says, describing themselves as people who Google a subject "and then have fun with it" [1]. Their reasoning: "Because listen, history is a story. We can get the facts kind of right and we're concocting a story. No historians were actually there" [1]. Rogan backs them fully: "History is all ours," he says, and "The idea that history can only be discussed by a historian" is, in his words, ridiculous [1]. He adds that there is a lot of history online and you can get the facts instantly [1].

Their method is to start from an episode topic and then stumble onto something that upends the schoolbook version. The example they give is Operation Unthinkable. In their telling, when the war ended Churchill disliked how close the United States and Russia were getting, and when the British said they lacked the manpower to knock the Russians out, he proposed arming "40,000 German prisoners of war" and marching them into Russia [1]. Churchill, one of them says, "wanted to team up with the Nazis to try to take over Russia," and they cap it with a bit from their show: "a Truth Beta Ginsburg. That's a fact, baby" [1]. For them the discovery goes beyond one fact: "so none of this history, as we're taught in school" is quite what it seems [1]. In the same run they repeat a much heavier claim, hedged with "allegedly: that Churchill and FDR knew about the Holocaust but let it go because Nazi experiments on victims were yielding scientific data" [1]. They cite a book they read on the subject. This is exactly where comedic history-hunting gets risky: a sensational claim presented with a qualifier, sourced to a single book, in a loose conversation.

The duo also turns history into bits about each other. Yannis jokes that he gets "a little triggered around him because the Nazis did occupy my home country, Greece," pointing at DiStefano, whom he calls a German kid from Ridgewood [1]. DiStefano describes reading a book about the Nazis on a JetBlue flight with a swastika on its cover, and they riff about making a paper-bag book cover like kids used to [1].

Yannis Pappas's mother and Nazi-occupied Crete

The episode's emotional anchor is the most personal example of dark history in all four conversations [1]. Pappas explains that his mother was a small child during the occupation of Crete. The German army was moving troops through mountainous terrain, and Greek guerrilla fighters, working alongside British, New Zealand and Australian troops, kept picking soldiers off because they knew the land [1]. His description of the German response: "So the Nazis were so brutal but smart in a devious way. They would take a girl from the village and put her up high on the truck to march through that area of that village so the guerrillas wouldn't shoot" [1]. If a soldier was shot, he explains, they would kill the girl. It was, in effect, a hostage system [1].

Then the story becomes his family's. The Germans were going to take his aunt. A family friend who worked for the Germans because he spoke German warned them, and the aunt was sent to hide in the mountains [1]. Soldiers came to the house at night with flashlights and pulled back the sheets on his mother, who was about seven. She was too small for what they wanted, a tall teenage girl [1]. He adds an eerie detail: a Nazi soldier came to the house every day for years, went into a room alone, and nobody ever learned what he did. "It's a family mystery," Pappas says; "Maybe he took a nap. Maybe he was a spy" [1].

Rogan's response turns the story into a broader point about human nature: "That is what's really scary about people that they could justify that kind of thinking of behavior." He adds that such things have happened throughout history, and that this is "probably a civilized version of what would have happened in 1200" [1]. One of the guests cites Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning on how atrocity can happen anywhere, and Rogan recommends Norman Ohler's Blitzed about Nazi drug use [1]. Here dark history is doing serious work: it tells us what people are capable of when a system licenses it.

How bad history smelled, and how violent it was

Before they reach Rome, the History Hyenas episode starts from something trivial. DiStefano's first cigar leads to cologne and deodorant, and then to how everyone in history must have smelled terrible, with no running water and weekly baths at best [1]. Pappas claims Muslim armies in the Crusades could smell Christian armies coming. Rogan brings up the Mongol sack of Baghdad, when a center of science was destroyed so thoroughly that the river supposedly ran red [1]. They wonder whether trauma and violent tendencies can be passed down, and Rogan points out that dogs are born knowing to mark trees as evidence that some memory is inherited [1].

The same group builds a long thread about Germanic violence. Rogan marvels that so many of the best cars come from one small country, and one of the guests says the Germanic people are "just to get things done" but also "more violent than others" [1]. The argument, such as it is, reaches back: "Because you think it's just the Nazis, but then when you look back, you're like, no, no, this has been happening," running from the Germanic tribes that "went after the Roman" to the Hessians hired by the British in 1776 [1]. Asked which warrior from history they'd least want to face, the answer comes back "Vikings. Biggest. And they were on mushrooms," followed immediately by "Dude, is that true?" [1]. That exchange shows the whole genre in a few lines: a vivid claim, then an honest moment of doubt, then on to the next bit.

Rogan also uses Rome as a warning. "Rome did it for a long time. There's a lot of civilizations that hang in there, but eventually it all falls apart," he says. His hope is that "We just have to make sure we avoid these very predictable patterns," which he says the founders tried to guard against in the Constitution and Bill of Rights by limiting the power of individuals or small groups [1].

Kurt Metzger: the clown who wants "a new story"

Kurt Metzger's relationship to history is the most openly conspiratorial and the most self-aware. He describes his filter plainly: he isn't believing or disbelieving anything; "I just want to hear a new story that doesn't make me bored," and he cross-references everything like a joke writer [2]. He calls himself a clown ("I'm not respectable at all. I'm a clown"), and the summary of his episode suggests that is exactly what frees him to go down rabbit holes others avoid [2].

His history is weird more than brutal. One of the funniest tangents is Jeffrey Hudson, the 17th-century court dwarf who was presented to the English queen inside a pie. Metzger says a nobleman later mocked Hudson by bringing a water pistol to a duel, and Hudson shot him dead with a real gun [2]. He and Rogan discuss the Munchkin actors who escaped Nazi-era Europe to appear in The Wizard of Oz, and Metzger observes that eugenics originated in America and England before the Nazis adopted it [2]. He points out that the original Pledge of Allegiance was recited with an outstretched arm, the Bellamy salute, until World War II, and uses it to mock the outrage over Elon Musk's gesture [2]. In each case a fact from the past knocks a present-day certainty off balance.

The corporate side of Nazi history comes up too. Rogan reads out that "Nazi SS divisions built seven labor camps were more than three thousand seven hundred prisoners were put to work for auto union," Audi's predecessor, and that a "Historical investigation commissioned by the company found that thousands of concentration camp inmates Have been forced to work for auto union" [2]. The talk moves to IG Farben and Bayer, and then to a theory, credited to a history YouTuber, that the Tylenol poisonings might have been corporate sabotage, which one speaker calls "very believable Considering it's a Nazi company" [2]. It's a small case study of how these conversations travel: from a documented fact (the company's own commissioned history) to a speculative leap in a couple of sentences.

Metzger also takes the thread back to antiquity. Asked whether the ancient Romans had secret power structures, the reply is "100% mystery schools" [2]. Jamie pulls up an article on "10 surprising things about the deep state starting with the Roman emperor Caligula," whose own Praetorian Guard knifed him, and the reaction is "So they had a deep state It's the oldest thing" [2]. The same article describes ancient Chinese emperors staffing a civil service through what researchers have called "the examination system from hell," which included "memorizing 400,000 characters" of Confucian text; cheating was harshly punished, and "Anyone caught looking on the paper of the person sitting nearby was executed" [2]. Metzger's alien lore draws on the same well, including the Nazi Die Glocke ("That's real this Nazi bell," as he puts it) and "tall whites" [2]. He repeatedly concedes that much of it is probably nonsense [2].

What keeps Metzger's history from being pure entertainment is his ethic. "You know a tree by its fruits," he says, and his summary line on the drone-strike whistleblower Daniel Hale and government secrecy is "Listen. Just don't lie" [2].

Felipe Esparza and Rogan: sewage, mercury and the "night soil" carts

Felipe Esparza comes to history partly through comedy itself. He mentions having a history podcast: "So I learned about the history of stand-up comedy," he says, and he tells Rogan about early radio comedian Eddie Cantor [3]. But the history in his episode that best fits this pattern is the filth [3].

Talk of Gangs of New York and Jake LaMotta leads to how violent and desperate life was after the Civil War [3]. Jamie then pulls up articles on "night soil": carts of human waste rattling through 1870s New York, sewage flowing past windows, and a suggestion that a waste dump near the White House water source may have contributed to President William Henry Harrison's death in 1841 [3]. Rogan calls sanitation the biggest breakthrough ever in controlling disease, and imagines future humans looking back at us with the same disgust [3]. Esparza grounds it in family memory: his grandmother's home in Mexico still had an outhouse [3].

The episode keeps digging. Rogan argues that the smallpox-blanket story may be exaggerated, since people then didn't understand how disease spread, but that European diseases still killed roughly 90 percent of Native Americans. He cites a religious chronicler of Columbus-era atrocities [3]. They read about Blackbeard demanding medical supplies during his 1718 Charleston blockade, including mercury injected by syringe as a common but ineffective syphilis treatment, and a wreck that contained such a device [3]. Rogan describes the tomb of China's first emperor, where the surrounding soil tests high for mercury. Legend says it is booby-trapped with rivers of the metal, and one estimate they read suggests up to 100 tons [3]. From there they move to alkaline hydrolysis ("liquid human remains"), patented in 1888, and on to prions, kuru among cannibals and mad cow disease [3]. The summary sums up the episode's takeaways as including that fame can destroy people and that sanitation changed everything [3].

Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, Ari Shaffir and Rogan: Unthinkable and Paperclip

In the fourteenth Protect Our Parks, the history detour grows out of a Netflix documentary on Churchill and the bombing of Dresden [4]. The group reads about Operation Unthinkable, Churchill's 1945 contingency plan for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, which was never carried out [4]. It's worth noting that this is the same plan the History Hyenas had just built a whole episode around, which shows how the same obscure detour spreads from comic to comic [1][4].

Rogan then brings up Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip: "I just listened to the paperclip book and it's terrifying," he says [4]. The group's version of American thinking at the time: "They're like listen I know you're a Nazi, but who knows we need it. Oh, yeah, come on over" [4]. Someone else sums up the logic: "It was an asset Yeah it was like gold" [4]. They also read about the Soviet counterpart, Operation Osoaviakhim, in which "more than 6,000 people were taken from former Nazi Germany as war reparations to the Soviet Union," rounded up in "the early morning hours of October 22nd 1946," with "the aim being to literally transplant research and production research centers" [4]. One comic's reaction is a very dark joke borrowed from The Big Lebowski: "say what you will about national socialism but at least it's an ethos" [4].

The history then becomes stage material in the most literal way. Huntsville, Alabama, with its rocket-scientist heritage, has a comedy club, and "every single comedian that goes there must do the same joke," one of them says. Another admits he did it: "I got 10 minutes out of that" [4]. They go on to Jack Parsons, the rocket pioneer who practiced the occult, described as "An open Satanist During the middle of the whole fucking rocket development program," whose old site now draws ghost hunters [4]. Rogan's broader line about artists from the same episode applies to these historical figures as well: "If you want a great artist You're gonna get a crazy person" [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that the real past is darker and stranger than the textbook version. All four conversations treat official history as a cleaned-up story. The History Hyenas say outright that history "as we're taught in school" leaves things out [1]. Metzger's whole approach is finding the story nobody told him [2]. The Protect Our Parks group treats Paperclip as proof that America made pragmatic deals with Nazis [4]. Esparza's episode shows how disgusting daily life was before sewers [3].

They agree that anyone can talk about history. Rogan says so directly: "History is all ours" [1]. None of these comics claims expertise, and nobody in the conversations treats that as a problem.

They split on how seriously to take their own claims. This is the most important difference. The History Hyenas admit they get the facts "kind of right" and are "concocting a story" [1]. Metzger is even more upfront that he's a clown who doesn't care if a story is true as long as it isn't boring, and he concedes that much of his UFO lore is probably nonsense [2]. Rogan, by contrast, often pushes for evidence or adds caveats: in the Esparza episode he says the smallpox-blanket story may be exaggerated while still accepting the scale of disease deaths [3], and in the Metzger episode he alternates between laughing along and asking for proof [2]. So some claims reach the audience as established fact (Auto Union's slave labor, confirmed by the company's own historians [2]; Operation Unthinkable as a real, never-executed plan [4]), and others as hedged speculation (the Holocaust "scientific data" claim, introduced with "allegedly" [1]; the Tylenol sabotage theory [2]; Vikings on mushrooms, questioned in the same breath [1]).

They disagree on what dark history is for. For the History Hyenas and Rogan, dark history is partly moral: Pappas's Crete story makes Rogan reflect on how people can justify cruelty [1], and a guest invokes Frankl on how atrocity can happen anywhere [1]. For Metzger, history is mostly ammunition against present-day hypocrisy: the Bellamy salute to mock outrage, eugenics' American origins to complicate easy stories about who the villains were [2]. For the Protect Our Parks crew it's mostly material, a premise that yields ten minutes on stage in Huntsville [4]. For Rogan and Esparza on sanitation it's perspective: things that seemed normal in 1870 look horrifying now, and today will look horrifying later [3].

Why It Works

The sources suggest a few reasons dark history keeps working as comedy fuel, even if nobody lays out a theory.

The truth is already absurd. A dwarf hidden in a pie who later wins a duel against a man armed with a water pistol [2], a prime minister who proposed arming German prisoners of war against his wartime ally [1][4], a Satanist in the middle of a rocket program [4], a governing apparatus in ancient China that executed people for glancing at a neighbor's exam paper [2]. None of these needs exaggeration to get a laugh. The comic's job is mostly to react.

Distance makes horror discussable. The Crete story is harrowing, but it is told decades later by a son whose aunt escaped, and the family mystery of the soldier in the room allows a joke ("Maybe he took a nap") without mocking the victims [1]. Rogan's point that the occupation was probably "a civilized version of what would have happened in 1200" shows how placing a horror on a longer timeline changes how we feel about it [1].

It deflates modern complaints and self-importance. The sanitation thread works because it re-scales everyday life: people once lived with sewage flowing past their windows, and a president may have died from contaminated water [3]. Rogan's thought that future humans will look back at us with disgust turns the joke back on the audience [3]. The same goes for the smell of history riff that starts with worrying about cigar smoke on your clothes [1].

It gives an irreverent, anti-authority attitude something concrete to work with. Metzger's approach, and the History Hyenas' "none of this history, as we're taught in school," both rest on the sense that official narratives hide things [1][2]. Documented cases like Paperclip or Auto Union's labor camps [2][4] lend credibility to that attitude, which is why it's so easy to slide from them to much weaker claims.

It gets passed around. Operation Unthinkable turns up in two separate episodes [1][4], and the Huntsville joke is one "every single comedian" who plays there does [4]. Once a story proves it can get a laugh, other comics pick it up.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies when the history is well documented and the comedy comes from the reaction to it. The Auto Union facts come from the company's own commissioned investigation [2], Operation Unthinkable was a real contingency plan that was never executed [4], and Osoaviakhim's scale and date are read straight from a reference [4]. Here the laughs and the facts support each other.

It applies to personal and family history told by the people who inherited it. Pappas's account of his mother in Crete is the strongest example: it is funny in places and moving overall, and it carries lessons about cruelty and complicity that a textbook might not [1].

It doesn't apply well as a source of verified fact. The hosts themselves say their facts are "kind of right" [1], Metzger chooses stories for how new they are, not how true [2], and several claims arrive with "allegedly," "supposedly" or an immediate "is that true?" [1]. The Holocaust "scientific data" claim in particular is a serious allegation drawn from one book in a loose conversation [1], and the Tylenol-sabotage idea is a YouTuber's theory that the speaker finds "believable" mainly because of the company's Nazi-era past [2]. The summary of the Metzger episode tells listeners to treat many of its claims as comedic speculation [2].

It has limits as moral commentary. Some jokes lean on real atrocity (the ethos line about national socialism [4], reading a swastika-covered book on a plane [1]), and the humor depends on the audience knowing it's a bit. Rogan's own caveat about the smallpox-blanket story shows that even a well-known dark anecdote can be overstated [3].

What To Do With It

1. Start from a documented anchor. Operation Paperclip, Operation Unthinkable and Auto Union's use of camp labor all come from books or commissioned investigations the comics cite [2][4]. Read Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip, which Rogan found terrifying, if you want the full story [4].
2. Ask "is that true?" the way DiStefano did. When a vivid claim like Vikings on mushrooms goes by, stop and check it before you repeat it [1].
3. Separate the tiers of claims. File what you hear into three bins: confirmed (company-commissioned history, reference-book dates), hedged ("allegedly," "supposedly"), and self-declared entertainment (Metzger's "new story" filter). The comics give you these signals themselves [1][2].
4. Use sanitation history to re-scale your complaints. Look up the 1870s New York "night soil" carts and the Harrison water-source story, then take Rogan's thought experiment seriously: what will people 150 years from now find disgusting about how we live? [3]
5. Collect your own family's history while you can. Pappas's Crete story exists because his mother told it. Ask older relatives about wars, occupations, outhouses and near misses, as Esparza's grandmother's outhouse shows [1][3].
6. Read the books the comics recommend for the serious side. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning on how atrocity can happen anywhere, and Norman Ohler's Blitzed on Nazi drug use [1].
7. Use history to test present-day outrage. Metzger's examples, the Bellamy salute and eugenics' American and English roots, are a reminder to check how a symbol or idea was actually used before joining a pile-on [2].
8. If you write comedy, look for places with a built-in story. Huntsville's rocket heritage gave one comic ten minutes of material [4]. A town's odd historical detour is a premise the audience already half knows.
9. Keep Rogan's warning about patterns in mind. Rome and other civilizations "eventually" fell apart, he says, and the point of knowing that history is to avoid "these very predictable patterns" [1].

Sources

1. 2249 - Yannis Pappas and Chris Distefano · The Joe Rogan Experience
2. 2298 - Kurt Metzger · The Joe Rogan Experience
3. 2276 – Felipe Esparza · The Joe Rogan Experience
4. Protect Our Parks 14 · The Joe Rogan Experience