A tale of two bears

Danger abounds when comedy falls flat

This weekend, I spent four wonderful days in Vancouver BC celebrating my wife’s birthday. Beyond the tremendous food, wonderful people, and killer record shops, it was also a chance to stay (mostly) offline.

Then I returned to Portland.

I’m not sure what’s left to be said about RFK Jr’s nosedive of a campaign, or nosedive as a person. To get ahead of a New Yorker story covering his actual intentions as a presidential candidate, he posted this video explaining what happened when he found a dead bear cub in upstate New York.

As the New Yorker explains,

One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)

The story gets worse. Way worse.

RFK was going to skin it and save the meat, but ran out of time as he had reservations at Peter Luger’s, one of New York’s most expensive steakhouses. (So much for his stans who claim he will “take down the elites.”) Along with some drunk friends—a former addict, RFK says he abstained from imbibing—he decided to place the dead cub in a popular area of Central Park. Given that he had a spare bike in his van, apparently they set it up to look like a cyclist hit the cub and fled the scene as a rebellion against the increasing bike lanes being installed in the city. Unexpectedly (to him), the dead bear in Central Park story took off on local news, yet RFK was able to avoid attention—until now.

RFK Jr has a weird obsession with animal carcasses.

Someone posted that we (as in, humans) tend to focus on the sensational and avoid what really matters. An example: many of us have pointed out Trump’s authoritarian impulses for years, and the dangers that he (along with Project 2025) poses if he regains power. The problem: not sexy enough. Ho-hum, the end of democracy, whatever. Never mind his success at overturning Roe v Wade and future promises of mass deportations, ending any discussion of critical race theory, and tracking women’s fertility.

But call the men weird? Now that’s attractive.

More to the point: it works. It works because the elite, like Trump, like RFK Jr, loathe being shown a mirror. They’re fine being the bullies. Being called out for bullying, and being dubbed “weird” at that? Their egos are too fragile.

So RFK can pull off a prank because he hates bike lanes, and likely all that cyclists represent in smart urban planning, but correctly state “what a weird fuck” and you hit a nerve. A nerve we have to keep hitting, because behind that weirdness lies strange and dangerous obsessions, like, as I co-authored in Time last June, the very real deaths that Kennedy helped inspire in Samoa with his anti-vax misinformation.

Sometimes outrageous behaviors help shield these men from nefarious intent. Kennedy once held a “health roundtable” featuring medical disinformation spreaders like Joe Mercola, Mikki Willis, and the “vaccines make spoons magnetic” lady in which he declared he would blacklist any researcher whose clinical work helped drugs attain FDA approval. That’s a deadly sentiment, and thankfully RFK will never win the presidency. Still, his influence cannot be ignored.

Nor the other reason women choose the bear: Joe Rogan. As my wife and I put on Netflix to decompress after a long drive back from Canada. his new special popped up as featured content. Knowing that I’d have to watch it for Conspirituality, I sighed. She agreed to endure it with me. I hit play.

We made it about 20 minutes.

I’ll likely finish the special. I have to watch this sort of content if I want to criticize it, understand it, draw any connections to it. Shortly before starting the special, I noticed chatter on Threads, and I had to avoid making assumptions. As it turns out, some of that chatter conflated actual ideas with comedic effect. While I don’t blame them for the assumption, it’s important to not jump to conclusions with every little statement.

I don’t have to agree with something in order to find it funny. Laughter is essential, and we lose something essential when we immediately write off comedians because we don’t agree with their politics or viewpoints. Even in those 20 minutes, I laughed when Rogan does a bit about taking 200mg of cannabis in an airport. I felt refreshed when he cracked a few jokes implicating himself in spreading misinformation and warning the audience not to take his advice.

But there was something nastier, more insidious lurking in this special. Rogan used to maintain some distance between his on-stage persona and podcast style. The content might have crossed over but they were generally treated as different mediums. Not so with this special: this performance is his podcast material. Plus, certain moments are no better than schoolyard bullying, with all the lack of humor that entails: brutish, overbearing, uncaring, false.

Like RFK Jr, Rogan seems incapable of contemplating the real-world dangers of the misinformation he brokers in. Call Texas the best place ever and take a crack at Biden—fine, that’s a viewpoint. But claiming vaccines are ineffective and useless is provably false.

The whole opinions versus facts sentiment holds here. The real problem is that they think their opinions are facts, and either taunt those who disagree or threaten to blacklist them.

And there’s nothing funny about that.