“And we were talking about the podcast world and some of our friends and Rogan and guys like you.”

It kind of destroys any pretense of neutrality when you refer to them as “some of our friends”.

It depends on the joke: most are funny regardless, but for some jokes a straight delivery is part of the humor.

They don’t look that much like seals.

They should be called “saber-toothed wilford-brimleys”.

She didn’t die; she’s just fine. It’s all a tenacious lie!

Dictatorships are built on narratives. To stop them one must break their narrative, which is an iterative process—they’ll change the narrative to explain away new developments, but if you force them to keep making changes faster than their adherents can absorb them, their shared reality will fall apart.