In the seven months since TBS announced it was canceling Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, the former host has said very little about what went down and how it made her feel. Until now.
“Everyone was really sad. It was really sad,” Samantha Bee says in this preview clip from the 200th episode of The Last Laugh podcast, which will run in full next Tuesday, April 4. It was her job to tell everyone on staff about the decision during what was supposed to be a summer hiatus, she recalls. “I told everybody and everybody was shocked and I was like, ‘I don’t know what to say.’”
As for Bee herself, who had delivered a final, scathing monologue—with COVID—just two days before Roe v. Wade was overturned, she tells me she was “shocked but not surprised.”
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“Listen, I’ve worked in television for a long time,” she says. “When you see the writing on the wall, you see it. And of course, I saw it.” Bee recalls telling her husband, fellow Daily Show alum Jason Jones, at the beginning of 2022, “If we make it past June, I think we’ll be very, very lucky.”
And while Bee, who is currently preparing to set out on a 16-city live tour, adds that she knew she would be fine “on a personal level,” she also admits, “It’s an ego blow, I’m not gonna lie. It’s not fun. You’re not like, ‘Oh, I love when everybody’s talking about me. What’s everybody saying? Oh, Ted Cruz is a big thumbs-down?’ That’s not joyful.”
“But the good thing is that I don’t give a shit and also I don’t read any of it,” she continues, saying that she was only aware of two people celebrating the news on Twitter: Cruz and Glenn Greenwald, who tweeted in July 2022, “By far Sam Bee’s most notable moment in 7 years hosting that dreary, banal liberal show—arguably her only notable moment—was when she called Ivanka Trump the c-word. A feminist legacy as trivial and inconsequential as it was failed and pointless.”
At her own mention of Greenwald’s name, Bee makes a sound like she’s gagging in disgust. “And you know what? His hatred, I breathe it like oxygen,” she says. “I’m like, give me some more. I’ll take it, I love it, I feed off it.”
As Full Frontal executive producer Allana Harkin tweeted at the time, “When someone like Ted Cruz is celebrating the cancellation of the tv show you worked on....you know you’ve done your job.”
But even if she was prepared to shrug off her critics, Bee says she “worried about everybody else because they’re not seasoned, cynical, professional battle-axes.”
“They haven’t taken as many kicks to the crotch as I have,” she adds. “I bounce back from that shit.”
Subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast now to hear our full 200th episode with Samantha Bee about the end of ‘Full Frontal,’ whether anyone asked her to guest host ‘The Daily Show,’ her upcoming ‘Your Favorite Woman’ live tour, and more when it drops next Tuesday, April 4.
