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Samantha Bee’s

Full-Frontal Assault

on the Trump Regime

Samantha Bee’s Full-Frontal Assault on the Trump Regime

Samantha Bee and her producer and writing partner at Full Frontal, Jo Miller, know people often watch their show as news. Comedy gives them cover, though—and freedom. They do real reporting, but unlike straight-­faced media, they’re not trapped by the creaky machinery of equal time, false equivalency, and sham neutrality. Bee and Miller do have two hard, fast rules: Mind your metaphors (don’t fear satire, but don’t depart from the truth, ever) and #dgaf (look it up).

Before the show’s launch early last year, Bee and Miller spent years together at The Daily Show, where Bee made her name elegantly cornering interview subjects into hideous self-parody. At Full Frontal she and Miller have accepted their new role among the informed commentariat, committing to careful reporting, conscientious fact-­checking, op-eds lighted for satire, and a ruthless conviction that their show is not for ratings, Twitter, or dumb people. (Though, for the record, their ratings usually top The Daily Show’s.) Full Frontal is also the most mercilessly feminist show (ever) (in history)—and Bee has emerged as a leading voice for the galvanized left. In April she’s even hosting Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on the same night as the cringey annual date between the White House and the Fourth Estate. Playing nice with a president so contemptuous of the media is going to challenge journalists for at least the next four years. Bee and Miller have resolved to play not-nice.

Virginia Heffernan: Full Frontal set a hard, tart pace for political comedy in its first season—and then started regrouping, like many of us in the US, in China, and, well, on earth. When did your regrouping start?

Samantha Bee: On election night, everybody was quietly retreating into their clothing. Turtlenecks, curling up in beanbags, pulling sweaters up.

Jo Miller: We’re gonna be wearing Slankets. Full Frontal Slankets. Safety Slankets for all of us.

SB: As everyone was retreating into their turtlenecks, my main response was “This is really going to change the show.” This show felt so much more permanent to me. It just got grounded. We need a bigger office. We need a full-time security guard. We need to change our layout. We need better systems.

JM: We set up trenchworks, like World War I. It’s gonna be a long war.

VH: This is the opposite of the traditional Wolf Blitzer approach: Cover the election, have no stake in it, repeat, or—

JM: Wolf Blitzer is running on Windows 95.

Samantha Bee: "We have a team of journalists working here, and a fact-checker. We care deeply about facts."

VH: —SNL’s approach: “Just keep laughing at everyone.” I know you have fun here, but you also seem to act on principle and with purpose.

JM: Beginning at The Daily Show, we’ve been doing this for a long time, staring into the abyss. You can’t turn away. It’s gonna be a long war. And we have to pull our head out of our American ass. This is a global shift. So it’s important that we tell real stories on our show.

SB: Everything’s grounded in research and journalism. We have a team of journalists working here, and a fact-checker. We care deeply about facts.

VH: I know we want to draw a bright line between The Onion and Full Frontal on the one hand, and Infowars on the other, but where is that line?

JM: We’re not fake news. Like, The Onion is a fake newspaper—that’s its idiom. It’s a parody of a newspaper—the format of it. But on the show, we’re not pretending to be a “news show.”

VH: You’ve also avoided the flat-out grieving, letting yourselves wallow.

JM: I went and read a bunch of memoirs of people who lived in the ’30s. Now we’re reading history books. We’re doing Edmund Burke, Masha Gessen. I’ve also read Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler. It’s time to read the Federalist Papers. We’re not maudlin or sentimental. We’re always sincere. We’re also funny. The worst moments are when you need satire the most. I think that’s why everybody loves The Onion forever, because they came through on 9/11 [“US Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With”]. You don’t abdicate your function right when you’re needed.

SB: A lot of the sillier things I’ve done really predate this show. I feel like I’ve left that behind. The stories we’re telling on our show are real. We’re just wringing as much comedy out of them as humanly possible.

VH: What about the metaphorical language you use? Trump talks in something like metaphors, where “more nukes” means “let’s go, Mets” or something. When you say stuff about reproductive rights, like “They have their hands on our vaginas,” is it possible that could be taken literally?

JM: But those metaphors of theirs are nonsense. They pretend to be talking in metaphors when they’re in fact lying. What Peter Thiel says about not taking Trump literally is bullshit, and it’s a way of spinning the fact that Trump lied on the campaign trail repeatedly—and made promises that he could not keep, even if he had every intention of keeping them. Why are we having a serious discussion about applying their spin to cover backtracking on unfulfillable promises, and taking that as a lens through which to view comedy?

VH: And you don’t think someone with opposing politics to yours could watch the show and see—

JM: The truth is we do the show for us. We don’t care if anybody doesn’t get our references. We don’t care if it goes too fast. We don’t care if you haven’t done the homework.

SB: Do your homework later. Or not. It doesn’t really matter. It sounds ridiculous and totally disingenuous, but we’re literally doing the show just for ourselves. And I think that is the key to the whole experience. That’s what allows me to completely disconnect from social media. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s just like doing comedy in the back room of a bar.

VH: You two report often in the red states. How are the women doing out there?

SB: We talked to enough people whose husbands voted on their behalf. We talked to women who do interesting jobs but they’re the only women within a 500-mile radius who do the jobs they do. They still never vote for women.

JM: They complain about sexism, but they still think women shouldn’t be in charge because they’re too emotional.

SB: My husband called the election. He also called Ivanka Trump our first female president. He’s a very good predictor of things to come.

JM: See, now my stomach hurts.

VH: Do you feel called to do this show now?

SB: Do I feel called? No! Is that a bad answer? I feel like, Jo, we always laugh about how we’re in our I-don’t-give-a-fuck years, and that is key to the show’s success.

JM: I think it was at 45 when I just stopped being nice at The Daily Show. It was like, “You’re talking over me, I’m not going to stop talking. You can shut up.” And, “Yeah, don’t say the thing I said a minute ago.”

SB: It’s also so fun to stop being a people pleaser all the time. It’s the greatest joy. I’ve been a people pleaser all my life, and there’s still a remnant of that person, but it’s getting smaller and smaller. It’s slipping down the drain.

VH: Tell me about this Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You seem to have started the exodus from that jolly DC bro roast. Now Trump’s not even going. Why undermine DC’s great annual tradition?

JM: When we planned it, we figured White House correspondents were liable to spend that evening either (1) eating lima beans at home because they were blacklisted or (2) sitting there in Spanx enduring a furnace of hostility from the most powerful man in the world. So we wanted to provide a third option, while celebrating the free press on which our show—not to mention our democracy—depends. Plus we really want to party with Shep Smith and Katy Tur, because they seem fun.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.

Fake @POTUS tweets by Owen Ellickson (@onlxn).

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

Illustrations by Nishant Choksi; patterns by Overlaponeanother


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