Learning Day: Yogi Bear Visits the U.N.

There are some moments in history so dark we don’t talk about them. And then there are moments that certainly didn’t happen and got penciled in later by malevolent time lords. If this “actual comic book” which “always existed here in our reality” is to be believed, then in 1961, Yogi Bear declared his cave an independent nation and argued his case before the United Nations:

Already this seems like a terrible mistake. This looks like Yogi Bear killed a businessman for his lunch and fled to a different channel. Why did they use a black and white photo at the wrong scale? Why is Yogi Bear twenty five stories tall? Did Barbera fire the only artist who knew bear sizes and how to draw rectangles? The wrongness of this juxtaposition feels intentional, like the artist is trying to say “a real nation of bears is on the way; this could fucking happen.”

The comic could not start in a more ordinary way. Boing, zoinks, Yogi Bear is tricking tourists into giving him sandwiches. Whether you remember Yogi Bear or not, you now have a full understanding of him. He’s a hungry rascal and his enemy is the law. It’s how any of us would describe ourselves after a bar closes or we’re opening a drawer of ladies’ socks.

Things don’t stay normal for long. As Yogi digs around in a tree hole for honey, he finds an ancient piece of paper. “Maybe there are directions on it for eating!” he shrieks incoherently. This is the kind of line you could ignore, and probably should, but what the fuck could Yogi Bear mean here? Does he think some paper turns into food if you do it right? Is he expecting secret new chewing techniques? Is this simply how a bear understands recipes? It’s a problem with no solution, but a great example of how this comic shouldn’t exist and wasn’t written by humans.

The paper is stranger than new eating techniques. It’s a treaty signed by an American general and the chief of the WaaWaa Indians declaring the wild bear population to be the rightful landowners of this national park. The name “WaaWaa” is, of course, a reference to how genocided people are always complaining. I wouldn’t want to step on a joke so timeless and elegant with one of my own so the rest of this sentence will just be a respectful silence to let you enjoy it … … … … .

Yogi Bear immediately declares his park an independent nation and makes himself prime minister, customs agent, and highway bandit.

He stops every car, steals their food under threat of bear, and sends them on their way. It’s the same schemes he was doing already, but on a grander, bolder scale. His country has one law: Give Me Your Picnic Basket and Fuck Off. And still, you might be thinking this is normal. This seems like a cute cartoon plot, right? It’s a zany bit that will end next page with the park ranger screaming, “Yogi! Why, you lousy bear! Stop declaring this the sacred soil of a new nation!” Well…

For the first time in his relationship with Yogi Bear, the ranger’s authority isn’t absolute. He has no idea how to deal with this. He knows this bear lies to get food, but would he really fake a native treaty lost for 94 years inside a tree? No, he decides. This is real. His only move is a desperate one. He tries to convince Yogi the world already has enough nations, and it backfires.

The only thing a bear can do to you worse than a fatal mauling is this. Yogi throws the ranger’s newspaper in this asshole’s face, tells him when he comes back from the United Nations he’s going to own everything in his life, and both of them believe that to be true. And that’s it! What a silly story! Wait, no. No, this can’t be. Where are the words THE END? T-this is still going?

In any normal comic book this would say YOGI BEAR IN A SECOND AND TOTALLY UNRELATED STORY but everything here is wrong. Yogi Bear is really at the United Nations and he is raising the flag of Bearsylvania. It’s their national symbol– the fallen basket of the first family picnic killed by bears. And as usual, a cop interrupts his fun.

By international law, any bear claiming to be the head of a sovereign nation is brought before a U.N. official to present their credentials. “Here’s a fucking sandwich,” he says. I love this. It’s exactly what a cartoon bear should do. But we’re not in Jellystone Park. We’re at the United Nations, and nobody here knows their role is in a Yogi Bear story. This man looks at the fiction he’s trapped within and refuses to take part in it.

“Shut down all zaniness, this is now an educational comic about detailed U.N. procedures,” this character explains to the bear and reader. Yogi Bear is almost certainly devastated by this news, but we’ll never know because he only has one expression. In a sane world this is where he would bail on this caper, deciding he preferred his old life of stealing snacks and fisting trees. But here, in Yogi Bear Visits the U.N., he stays. He grins through every step of the country-forming process. It’s nuts. It’s like Shredder stopping a fight to help the ninja turtles apply for a jury duty exemption? Kind of? Normally I’d describe something this strange as being like Yogi Bear filling out paperwork for 30 pages to get his cave recognized as a sovereign nation, but that’s really what’s happening. Anyway, let’s finish up form 307-A and get Yogi Bear his temporary delegate pass.

“Yogi Bear has been a globalist elite for almost a minute, so it’s time for him to go into a back room and take photos with nude children,” writes the Yogi Bear author. “Exactly! And I’m going to add skull calipers,” draws the Yogi Bear artist. “What the shit am I typing,” I say out loud before just ending the paragraph.

The Jellystone Park ranger has followed Yogi all the way here. The man’s day job is making sure no one feeds wild animals and he has assembled a legal team to dispute this treaty. His first argument is that Yogi and his kind are too lazy for independence, and it does not go over well. The U.N. representative, the delegate he brought himself, even the unflappable Yogi Bear all gasp. I admit there’s a lot about this world I don’t understand, but… is the ranger’s hatred for Yogi Bear racial? Fuck. That explains a lot. It’s dark and I hate it, but things are starting to make sense.

The delegate’s second argument of “there is no rule saying bears can address the assembly” also fails for reasons you and I saw coming, but this comic took place 36 years before Air Bud. The United States delegate had no way of knowing he was leading his argument into a death trap. It’s at this point the writer loses his mind, by the way.

They knew the ranger was supposed to be Yogi’s antagonist, but didn’t have anything for him to do after he got thrown out of the U.N. for bear racism. So he, hundreds of miles from his jurisdiction, tries to arrest Yogi and Boo-Boo for walking on the grass. This is nonsense. This is something a Yogi Bear writer would tell his anesthesiologist before never waking up. And it keeps going.

This unarmed maniac with no authority chases the two innocent bears through pages and pages of exposition. It goes on so long Yogi Bear forgets why he’s running and moves on with the script as if it’s not happening.

The premise for this conflict is so thin most of the other characters in the story can’t detect it.

“BEAR SLAVERY,” screams Yogi Bear, now worried no one can hear him. And while none of the characters in his universe heard it, the universe itself did. It shatters. Racistly.

“Hey, offensive caricature! Fellow trusteeship council members! Look at this stupid shit I got from some, and I quote, backwards pacific island, wha–? The sandwich from earlier!?” I promise there is no narrative reason for this to have happened and it serves no future purpose. This is the incomprehensible implosion of Yogi Bear’s reality– sudden sandwiches and even more sudden racism.

The madness escalates as news of the possible independent bear nation has reached the bears. They have formed an immigration caravan marching toward Bearsylvania. It raises some questions about the bears in this world. They seem pretty close to people, but how much of their bear instincts remain? For instance, if one of them got into the U.N., would it understand how an escalator worked? Or would it panic and run the wrong direction, trampling any human in its path?

Because that’s what happened. That’s what Yogi Bear fucking did.

Like the desperate bear refugees from every park and woodland, this story marches on. Yogi Bear is addressing the general assembly, and it seems troublingly authentic. But is it? One of the ways I’m cool is that I know nothing about U.N. procedures. I could check the Internet if Yogi Bear followed proper procedures, but no one has read this comic. It was hatched from a creature we burned as a witch. I mean, watch what happens when I google it:

Huh. There was one match on Google and it didn’t come from Bacon Randy’s Epic Comic Failz, but a 2019 Foreign Policy article on how this obscure comic was “strangely plausible.” Anyway, let’s get back to the strangely plausible comic. When we left, the vengeance-crazed park ranger and the American government were bringing in a witness.

Uh oh.

The chief of the WaaWaa Indians says “how” four times to set up a gag where he asks how stairs work. Normally I’d describe this as being like a Yogi Bear writer transcribing his entire thought process for a racist joke but that’s really what’s happening. It’s so sideways from what you and I know as comedy that Yogi Bear refuses to smile at it. And this is weird, sure, but what happens next is weird.

Chief Grizzly hears Yogi Bear talk and it blows his mind. How! He lives in this world where all bears speak, and to get into this very room he had to walk past multiple TVs playing news footage of every bear in the country walking and talking like Man. You have to be racist all the way to your bones to be writing a Yogi Bear comic and think, “This little bear worshiper is so savage he probably hasn’t even heard of bears.”

Chief Grizzly was going to tell the general assembly the treaty Yogi Bear found was invalid, but upon seeing the miracle of the talking bear, he betrays America and tells the U.N. to do whatever Yogi says.

At least for a few minutes.

Chief Grizzly is an unreliable narrator speaking mostly in racially insensitive grunts, so it’s impossible to know all the details, but he seems to think there’s oil on the land in question and he betrays his new god for money.

Heartbroken, Yogi Bear heads back to his life of starvation and slavery, his words as formally delivered to the United Nations, not mine. But it’s worse than before. Not only because he came so close to freedom, but because his home is now a detention center for every bear in the country. The confused, problematic stereotype who took his dreams offers him a ride back in his limousine, but Yogi would rather walk. “It takes longer!” he tries to joke.

“Fuck you, I control the speed at which you move!” screams the deranged park ranger still tormenting this poor animal. But the two of them have a lot in common. He’s also going home to a nightmare. He abandoned his post for days, torturing a bear for personal reasons. The park he’s meant to protect is infested with what has to be the highest density of dangerous wild animals ever assembled. He’s in the middle of a mental breakdown and the author didn’t have a zany way of putting it. His last moments at the United Nations are spent yelling at bears on a TV.

“What are the rules of my world, you goddamn fucking bears!? Who put this TV outside!? Glllbglbblbb!!! What part of any of this is strangely plausible!?”

…

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