Tig Notaro Ended Friendship With Cheryl Hines After Marriage to RFK Jr.

Remember Tig & Cheryl: True Story, the podcast in which pals Tig Notaro and Cheryl Hines would swap stories about documentaries they’d watched? If the show is not on your radar, it might be because they haven’t recorded a new episode since the fall of 2023. What happened?

“Cheryl was one of my favorite friends to be ridiculous with,” Notaro told Tom Papa this week on his Breaking Bread podcast. “And we made each other laugh so hard. And I love documentaries, and it was fun to have to watch a documentary every week, but also we took the pressure off, because we would ask each other things like, ‘Who are you attracted to in this documentary?’”

Papa loved the podcast, a fun listen while driving his daughters to their dance classes.

“Yeah,” said a somber Notaro. “That show ended.”

You can probably guess what happened. “Cheryl’s married to Bobby Kennedy Jr.,” Notaro said. “When he was announcing his run, I just felt like I needed to step away because there are beliefs that were like a gnat on the arm years ago that were getting further into the spotlight.”

Notaro’s friendship with Hines predated her marriage to Kennedy, so the Curb Your Enthusiasm star encouraged her comedian friend to hear out his political ideas before making a final judgment. “I was like, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I just didn’t trust it,” Notaro admitted. “And then he endorsed Trump, and it just got hard.” 

Even though Hines also distanced herself from Kennedy’s beliefs at first — “We don’t agree on everything” — Notaro wasn’t buying it. “It’s not my world. It’s a hard path,” she said. “You’re okaying a particular ride for this country to go on.”

It’s not the first time Hines has received grief over her marriage, and it probably won’t be the last. She got blasted on The View this week, defending RFK Jr.’s qualifications to lead the country’s Health and Human Services Department. How can you credibly stand by your man in the face of questions like Joy Behar’s “Does he or does he not have a brain worm?”

Hines’ responses like “It ate just a little bit of his brain and died” probably aren’t going to win over too many converts.

The whole situation is a shame, lamented Papa. “The two of you on that podcast were just a delight,” he said. “You really would just go off on the silliest things.”

“It’s really sad because it did bring me so much joy,” Notaro said. “Cheryl did bring me so much joy.”