If you can’t beat them, join them! Bill Nye the Science Guy showed fans — and haters! — that he has a healthy sense of humor and isn’t afraid to be the butt of a joke. On Friday, July 31, he shared a video in which he reads mean tweets about himself.
In the video, the ‘90s icon and former mechanical engineer appears in a crisp white dress shirt, his characteristic spectacles and pastel-striped bowtie at the ready.
“Hi, Bill Nye here, just reviewing some of the mean tweets people bother ….they take the time to tweet about me,” he says in the two-and-a-half minute clip.
In a style akin to Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets series, in which celebrities read and react to disparaging messages people have written about them on Twitter, Nye then proceeds to deep-dive into the hate.
“I f—king hate Bill Nye that a—hole guy! F—k that misogynistic t—t!” one user wrote. Nye, 59, gives the camera a confused look before noting that this probably wasn’t the right way to use the word “t—t.”
“Bill Nye made me hate science to a whole new level because he thought it was fun and I think it still sucks,” another user wrote, to which Nye smiled wryly and replied, “Well, you’re welcome.”
“You pretend the global warming fairy is real even as you live in a mansion. Maybe do cartwheels for voodoo,” another cracked.
Nye came to fame in the ‘90s in a video series wherein he explained the ins and outs of elementary school science. His self-titled show ran from 1993 to 1998 on PBS.
Currently, Stanford University filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado are using him as the subject of their latest project, The Bill Nye Film, a documentary about the scientist’s life. It is set to premiere in 2017, pending a successful Kickstarter campaign; the directors are hoping to crowdsource $650,000 before their Aug. 13 deadline.