Besides the fact that Rogan’s audience is 30-40 times larger, I mean.

The answer: They’ve both told tasteless jokes in the past but only one of them will be embraced by official Washington on its glitziest night of the year.

>⁦@Trevornoah⁩ will headline wh correspondents dinner. pic.twitter.com/T6ut4nLSlG

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 14, 2022

The Rogan/Noah comparison is germane because Noah unloaded on Rogan last week for racial insensitivity, prioritizing his solidarity with the left over his solidarity with fellow comedians. (Which is standard for major late-night TV shows.) Rogan had already apologized by then but Noah was in no mood to forgive. Or at least, his audience was in no mood to forgive and Noah felt duty-bound to reassure them they were right, as usual.

But he’s throwing stones from the porch of a glass house. Noah himself told enough tasteless and/or racially tinged jokes before landing his gig at “The Daily Show” that he was nearly canceled before shooting his first episode. Jews were repeat targets. This one, retrieved from the archives by Greg Pollowitz today, doesn’t even qualify as a gag:

South Africans know how to recycle like israel knows how to be peaceful.

— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) June 2, 2010

Imagine hiring a guy to host a major American comedy show with joke-writing chops like that.

This one, also dug up by Pollowitz, would qualify as a major offense to Rogan’s critics if Rogan had said it:

"It doesn't kiss like a monkey, in fact when you close your eyes you can't tell the difference!"- overheard in Thailand

— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) January 2, 2011

Comedy Central chose not to bow to the criticism and hired Noah anyway, leading Noah to tweet this sensible Rogan-esque plea for equanimity:

To reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian.

— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) March 31, 2015

Every now and then, some of his old off-color material would come back to haunt him — and he wasn’t always in the mood to apologize. The Hollywood Reporter asked him in 2018 about another comment that would have meant big trouble for Rogan if he had said it:

Trevor Noah refuses to apologize for his old jokes. While talking to an Australian radio show Thursday (July 26), Noah insisted that he would not take back a joke he made about aboriginal women being ugly. The comments come from a standup show he did in 2013.

“What I understand about outrage, though, what I mean is that people don’t generally want to listen or understand from their side. They go, ‘No, we’re angry,’” he said. “And regardless how many times you speak about the thing, they still want to be angry and so all you can do is fall back and say, ‘I’ve addressed this.’

“We live in a world where people want to unearth things that have already been unearthed,” he told the program’s hosts.

That was astute. The cancelers are jonesing on outrage and no amount of apologizing will satisfy their need for a fix. All one can do is admit error, express remorse, and move on.

Which is what Rogan did, whereupon Noah blew him up on his show anyway.

Noam Blum is the person who first called attention Noah’s hypocrisy a few days ago on Twitter and capped it with this irony:

Holy shit, Rogan stood up for him. pic.twitter.com/RIld1r7VjZ

— Noam Blum (@neontaster) February 9, 2022

Rogan is a man of the left himself, a Bernie Sanders supporter. But when the cancelers came for Noah for dubious jokes, Rogan put his solidarity with a fellow comedian above his solidarity with liberal sensitivities.

Which, ironically, is also what the guy who hosted “The Daily Show” before Noah did with Rogan amid the media pile-on these past two weeks. If Noah’s sins can be forgiven to the extent that he’s now eligible to share a dais with the president, Rogan’s sins can be forgiven to the extent that he’s still eligible to hold cringily credulous three-hour conversations with anti-vaxxers on Spotify, no?

Rogan would be a vastly better WHCD keynoter than Noah by any measure, incidentally. Believe it or not, the Correspondents Dinner first landed on the cultural map because occasionally the comedian invited to speak would mock the guest of honor — to an awkward, even uncomfortable degree. Don Imus roasted the Clintons in 1996, then Stephen Colbert hit George W. Bush hard in 2006. No one expects anything daring at Biden’s expense from a comedian — and liberal — as orthodox as Noah but Rogan would be a whole other ballgame. And he’d be funnier: “It’s kind of weird people will get really mad if you use [the N-word] and tweet about it on a phone that’s made by slaves,” he said recently of the efforts to cancel him.

But Rogan was never going to get this gig, and not just because the White House isn’t looking to cuddle up to a vaccine skeptic who’s mired in racial controversy. Rogan has repeatedly speculated that Biden is senile, not a point that the White House would want to see ventilated even in jest. They’ll be fine with good ol’ Trevor. He’ll play nice.