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It is the first day of spring—and the first day of public congressional hearings on the Russian hacking scandal—and Samantha Bee is heading out on her lunch break to run some errands. Indeed, she is such a busy Bee these days that to spend time with her, one must agree to trail along while she checks things off the to-do list that comes with feeding a family of five. “Stick with me—I’ll take you to allll the finest grocery stores,” she says as we head down the escalator to the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle. As she is thumping cantaloupes in the produce section, a hipster bro approaches Bee and says, “Your show is great!” and keeps on walking. “Aww, thanks,” she says sweetly. “That’s nice.” Does she get approached more these days? I ask. “A little bit. People are strangely grateful. They say thank you a lot, which makes me feel a little weird.” Wearing jeans, sneakers, and an MSGM coat emblazoned with big pink flowers, Bee, 47, can come off as that certain unflappable, can-do soccer mom. If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to guess that she is the host of a splenetic weekly political-satire show that airs for a half hour every Wednesday night on TBS.
As The New York Times recently reported, purveyors of televised liberal outrage have seen a ratings surge in the era of Trump, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is no different.The show’s viewership now averages 3.9 million per episode—up 98 percent among adults under 50 since its premiere—which is why Bee’s life on nearly every level has suddenly been supersized: more fame, bigger staff, constant demands on her time. “Mondays are stressful,” she says as she hunts in vain for the only brand of hummus her kids will eat. On top of all this, her family is moving in a week into a reported $3.7 million seven-room co-op on the Upper West Side. “With kind of, like, no furniture,” Bee says. It is the first home she has ever owned in the city, and because of said busyness she has hired a decorator. “I’m hopeless,” she says. “I’ve never had a properly decorated home before. I recently took photos of all of my existing furniture to try and donate it to Habitat for Humanity, and they straight up rejected 50 percent of it—apparently I’ve been living like an animal.” She laughs. “This woman who is helping me is so low-key, exactly my speed.” She throws a box of peanut-butter crackers into the cart. “There’s a lot of decisions now where I’m just like”—she lets out a sigh—“I don’t know; you pick. I’m going to choose a terrible white, the wrong white.” Is there a design scheme that can be summed up in a word? “Adult,” she says.
Bee heads to the checkout line, and I mention the hearings in Washington, D.C. Because the taping of her show is in 48 hours, Bee has been going full tilt since the crack of dawn and has not looked at either her phone or a television. When I tell her that this particular Monday is already being described as “the worst day of Trump’s presidency” (which is saying something) and that people are taking some sort of cold comfort in how ineffectual his first days have been, she says, “I don’t really want to support that viewpoint.” She unloads her groceries onto the conveyor belt. “I think people should maintain their outrage—I’m going to stay hysterical.” She laughs. “It’s hard to do, though. And it’s going to be really hard to do when the weather gets warm.” She slips into the voice of a party girl with a summer share in the Hamptons. “I just want to forget about my troubles!” She helps the cashier bag her groceries. “I’m, like, over it. Can we talk about something else? OMG, you’re obsessing.” Now even the cashier is laughing. “Cheer up!”
When I first meet Bee—three weeks earlier—she is sitting behind a cluttered desk in her dark office on the far West Side of midtown Manhattan looking worried. On her desk is a mixture of the personal and the profane: a brooch that Madeleine Albright gave her; a beautifully framed needlepoint that reads wtf?; an unopened bottle of expensive red wine. Tacked to the wall above her is an enlarged photograph—a close-up of the face of an angry little girl. “I had that image put on my daughter’s birthday cake,” says Bee. “She’s eleven now, and that sums up her personality perfectly.”
She looks like Johnny Rotten, I say.
“I know!” Bee says. “She was one and a half in that picture, and her expression has never changed.” She laughs. “So very mad.”
Clearly, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee can sometimes feel a bit like a cathartic, 22-minute Sex Pistols set, but instead of hurling spit gobs and insults at the royal family in mid-seventies London, she’s throwing verbal Molotov cocktails into the dumpster fire that is American politics in 2017. Take, for instance, the scorching eight-minute monologue about Hillary Clinton she delivered just the day before the election in November. “Evidently,” she said, “a critical mass of Americans find a normal, center-left policy nerd less likable than a vindictive, pussy-grabbing hate-Zamboni who jokes about killing his enemies.”
The Russian author and dissident Masha Gessen, whom Bee refers to as a “friend of the show,” is amused by my Sex Pistols analogy but says Bee is “not disruptive in the way punk rock is. She goes for the substance, and she has extraordinary clarity. What’s she’s doing is news analysis—with vast amounts of research—that happens to be funny.” Jo Miller, the show runner and executive producer of Full Frontal, recently noticed someone on Twitter describing the show as “evidence-based comedy,” which she thinks sounds about right.
Bee, who had been a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for twelve years, created Full Frontal with Miller, a former Daily Show writer who also happens to be a Fulbright scholar with extensive postgraduate work in medieval Jewish history. The show went on the air on TBS in February of last year—Bee the only woman hosting a late-night comedy show—to pretty much universal praise. And then she and her team spent the next several months covering the most cockamamie presidential election in U.S. history—a gift to comedy in many ways. Like seemingly every other sentient human being, Bee thought a Hillary victory was a fait accompli. “Look,” she says, wearily sinking into her chair, “part of what we were all so excited about on November 7 was the prospect of not having to talk about the election anymore. We just thought our world was about to open up. We thought, We’ve crossed this barrier—we’re about to have a female president.”
Because she satirized her way through the Bush and the Obama years on The Daily Show, I was curious to know exactly how different the Trump era feels thus far. The trickiest part, says Bee, is accounting for chaos. “The ground is shifting beneath our feet all the time. I crave predictability right now. It’s really sad when you wake up and go, ‘Can’t it just be a boring day?’ ” On the evening of our interview, she was lamenting the fact that the night before, Trump had somehow convinced pundits—“because he did not light the stage on fire or murder someone in the chamber”—that he had finally become presidential by giving a garden-variety teleprompter reading to the joint session of Congress. But by the time we spoke again, a few days later, Trump had relit his hair aflame by accusing President Obama of wiretapping him when he was in office. “We all knew it was coming,” she says, almost gleefully. “But the level of panic was something to behold. Each one of his freak-outs has its own special color and character, but this was a good one. I scrapbooked it!”
Bee also worries about crossing the line from satire into activism—which is totally not funny. I ask if she has noticed how so many comedians have completely lost their sense of humor on Twitter. “Oh, we’ve all become very earnest,” she says. “You do have to draw a line—and it’s a very fine line. We put a lot of thought into getting it just right, not being too preachy. You can’t make people do things.” She laughs. “I mean, look: Ultimately, we are a comedy show. I’m probably not going to save the world.” She levels me with an I-told-you-so look. “I tried to warn everyone, but no one listened.”
Part of what makes Bee so perfect for her role is that she is an outlier in every respect: a Canadian in America; a woman with a job once held exclusively by men; a comedian who has never done stand-up; a pundit who’s never worked in the newsroom. “Stand-up is an art form that I am completely enchanted by,” says Bee, citing Amy Schumer and Joan Rivers as particular favorites, “but I’m not a part of that world at all. I can see it; I can’t enter it.” What she admired about Rivers was her bravery. “It was astonishing to me the things she would say and get away with. She really went there. And you know what? It didn’t always work for me, but when it did, it so worked.”
Bee came to the U.S. in 2003 to work for The Daily Show; her husband, the actor and comedian Jason Jones—who also has a show on TBS, The Detour—followed the next year. The two of them, both Toronto natives, met 20 years ago while doing regional children’s theater. “Touring children’s theater,” Bee says, rolling her eyes. “With, like, wigs and stuff. It was awful. We performed it in malls.”
Bee has also spent close to zero time around journalists and TV-news folk. She went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner exactly once, in 2008. “I went by myself because I was not famous enough for a plus one. And I was massively pregnant. There were definitely people present who watched The Daily Show and had seen my work, and I got a lot of side-eye—but again, it’s not my world.”
Searching for an analogue or a predecessor to Samantha Bee, I kept coming up blank. There is an element of Tina Fey–anchoring–Weekend Update to what she does—they both share a certain wry, smarty-pants charm—and, sure, there is a soupçon of Schumer at her vulgar best in there somewhere, but Bee really is in a category by herself. When I ask Gessen if she can think of anyone, she says, “I guess it’s the same genre as John Oliver, but I think she’s actually more incisive—it’s a style thing.” But then it hits her: “Andy Rooney!” and we both laugh. “He wasn’t nearly as sharp as she is, but there is a similarity there.”
It turns out to make perfect sense that Gessen would cite the curmudgeon of 60 Minutes: Bee, who is constitutionally grumpy, has been obsessed with the show since she was a child. “The Wonderful World of Disney came on, and then 60 Minutes right after,” she says. “It was the weirdest cocktail of Sunday-evening entertainment. I still watch it. I love it—I’ve always been interested in and motivated by the news, but I would not have expected it to become my job. I was talking about that with my husband just this morning. I was like, ‘How did I wind up with a career in the news?’ And then Jason reminded me that I have a tape of myself doing the news when I was, like, six. I called it News for Goofs.”
She has recently started making her three children, who are eleven, eight, and six, sit down and watch 60 Minutes, family style. “Sometimes we’re all sitting there and one of them will turn to me and say, ‘Why are we watching this? What is this for?’ Sometimes they’re in a puddle of tears. Which is awful.” She stares at me for a long moment. “I pin their eyelids open and force my children to cry!”
Bee has been sitting behind her desk the entire time we’ve been talking, which means I can see only the black jacket she is wearing. “This is a quality blazer,” she says. Who made it? “Saint Laurent,” she says, and then stands up. She is wearing jeans and high-top sneakers. “The jeans are just garbage—everything from here down is just a garbage outfit. And I knew it when I was leaving the house today. I put a good blazer on in the hope that it covers up the rest of what I’m wearing. I have quite a blazer collection—my battle clothes. I’m covered.”
It has taken Bee nearly an hour to fully relax. Now that she has, I ask her why her brazen on-camera persona is so different from the soft-spoken, cautious woman sitting before me. “It’s just a performance energy that I tap into,” she says. “It’s a little bit like a blazer—it’s something that you put on, and then once it’s done, it’s released.” She rethinks for a second. “It’s actually less dramatic than putting on and taking off a blazer. It’s not that artificial. It’s something that I can really only channel for a short period of time. I don’t at all mind standing in front of a crowd—I have a performance instinct that is strong—but I don’t need it; I don’t die for it. Once I give up being on camera, I will never do it again.”
Suddenly she picks up a piece of paper that’s been sitting on her desk—the set design for the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” she is putting on in Washington on April 29, the night of the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The DAR Constitution Hall is essentially a giant, cavernous room, and Bee is worried enough about how she is going to fill that room with sound and comedy and humans that she and her staff recently took the train to D.C. to stake it out and test the acoustics for themselves. When I ask for some details about the actual show, though, Bee is vague. “The ideas for the segments are preconceived,” she says, “but the show is weeks from now and the material has to be very of-the-moment, so it can’t be pre-written—plus, we have some secrets. We want there to be a lot of surprises for everyone.” Will there be funny people and guest stars?
“Yeah, there will be a little bit of that,” she says, “but not too much. We’re conceiving of it as an episode of our show in a different setting, with a different set of parameters and a different time frame, with a lot of diverse elements to it.” She blinks a couple of times. “Wanna come? There will be a fun party!” Another pause. “People better come. It’s terrifying.”
Earlier, Bee confessed to me that she is not great at a party. “Oh, I am really quiet in real life,” she said. “There is no room I would ever walk into where anyone would go, ‘Here she is!’ I mean, not ever. Not in the past, not today. I just don’t work that way. It sounds disingenuous, but I am supershy and probably just this side of a social-anxiety disorder. Like sometimes, if I go to parties, I cry.” She starts to laugh. “It’s like an out-of-body experience: Am I holding this glass weirdly? Do other people hold glasses like this? I don’t know what to do with my hands. Why do I come to these?!” She lets out another laugh, this one big and full-throated. “So it’s great that I’m having a super big party at the end of April. That was a smart choice.”
In this story: Hair: Didier Malige; Makeup: Yumi Lee Sittings Editor: Sara Moonves Tailor: Leah Huntsinger at Christy Rilling Studio