It’s taken a while for Samantha Bee to get over the “shock” of losing her late-night TV platform. But now that she has, the comedian wants to make it clear that she still has a lot to say.
For our 200th episode, Bee returns to The Last Laugh podcast to look back on the legacy of Full Frontal and ahead to the nationwide live tour she never could have pulled off while still hosting a weekly show. She directly addresses those who found her on-screen persona too “angry” and reveals whether anyone from The Daily Show reached out to her about being a guest host after Trevor Noah stepped down. After everything, Bee is more confident than ever about how she wants this next chapter of her career to go.
When I reveal that Bee is the guest for our 200th episode, she lets out a gasp and replies, “Oh my God! Are you serious? I’m like Queen Elizabeth!”
The last time she appeared on the podcast—for the eighth episode, all the way back in May of 2019—we recorded in her Full Frontal offices in New York City. Four years later, that show is no longer on the air and Bee is about to embark on a 16-city tour of a new live show she has developed called “Your Favorite Woman.”
“I have something to say, so I want to say it. And this is the way that I can say things right now,” Bee says. “It’s been a really interesting experience to drill down on the things that I really care about and the things that I want to talk about moving forward. I feel like everyone always says you should do something scary. So I’m like, OK, well, I’ll just stay terrified.”
As for what exactly Bee wants to say with the show, she tells me, “It’s pretty fraught out there for women right now. And so I think I’m going into this experience just going, all right, let’s gather and talk about all the shit that’s going on.”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
Are there things that you feel like you can do in the format of a live show that you just couldn’t do on television?
I think so, because when you’re building a television show, the machine is more strict—or the way that I conducted my TV business was that type of strict machine. It was 21 minutes, you’ve got to go hard down a couple of different paths. It can be expressive, but I never really got so personal on television. It didn’t feel like the right medium, maybe, for more personal stories.
You felt like it wasn’t about you?
It got personal sometimes, but the setting didn’t lend itself to that. I felt like there was a bigger—I don’t want to say a bigger mission—but television is television, and a live performance is live performance, and so it’s looser and longer and there’s just more time to be self-deprecating or indulgent or just nuts.
Is there anything scary about that, to share more personal stuff on stage?
Yeah, it’s not really like me. I don’t have a social media presence where I’m like, “Look at every aspect of my life!” And not that this show is that either, but I generally have a pretty hard line between what I share publicly and my private life, which is very private. Not in a terrifying way; I just don’t find it super interesting. I don’t think that anyone wants to watch me make a salad. Like, who gives a shit? I don’t really want to film myself doing it and I don’t think anyone cares. So it is a bit of a departure.
Talking about the circumstances that led to this, I would love to go back to what ended up being your final episode of Full Frontal, because it was quite a dramatic one on a lot of levels.
It was! I know, it was two days before Roe got overturned. It was the Wednesday of that week, and we knew it was happening, we just didn’t know what day. I had COVID.
So I imagine you almost canceled that show or you considered canceling that show?
Well, I mean, it’s not like I knew that it would be our last— I definitely didn’t know that it was going to be the last show. I didn’t want to cancel it, none of us wanted to cancel it, because we knew that the [Supreme Court] decision was coming. We just wanted to say one last thing before we knew the decision was coming down. So it was sort of a no-brainer. And we were so practiced at filming the show outside of the studio. No one was excited. I didn’t want to do it in my backyard, under my overhang.
It was also raining, right?
It was raining. I did my own makeup. My skin is very pink, my skin is the weirdest color, but I was mercifully not very sick. Testing positive [for COVID], but not feeling bad or really different in any way. So it wasn’t that hard to do. And we were like, “Well, fuck, we have a whole show. I want to do it. I don’t want to not do it.”
It was incredibly timely.
It was so timely, and it wasn’t like we could go on vacation and come back and do the same material. We knew the world would be totally different. And it was. So I’m really glad that we did it. There is a beautiful, weird symmetry to doing the last show as I look out the window, right where I’m looking right now, under this porch in the rain.
How and when did you find out that the show had been canceled?
We were on our break, so I found out over the break. I had gone on a big family vacation, and we came back, and then I found out a couple of days after we came back in mid-to-late July. And I told everybody and everybody was shocked and I was like, “I don’t know what to say.” Everyone was really sad. It was really sad.
Were you shocked?
Shocked but not surprised. I wasn’t surprised. Listen, I’ve worked in television for a long time. When you see the writing on the wall, you see it. And of course, I saw it. We talked about it a lot. Like, openly talked about it a lot. And I remember having said to my husband, Jason [Jones], maybe in the beginning of the year, “If we make it past June, I think we’ll be very, very lucky.” I do recall in a kind of a vague way thinking it’s a convenient time for them to get rid of a show, when you’re on a long break. It’s like, “We’re on an extended hiatus, we’re refocusing, we’re selling all the chairs, we’re selling all the office furniture, and we’ll just see if there’s a show after that!”
I mean, it’s so hard because you are at the top of this thing and there are all these people who work for you, so that part must be incredibly difficult to know that so many people’s livelihood relies on it.
One hundred percent.
How did you feel personally about it?
Listen, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. So on a personal note, it’s fine for me. I’ve done a lot. Personally, I’ve accomplished a lot. And I don’t take that for granted and I’m very, very lucky. I really worried about everybody else, for sure. 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.
There were some gleeful reactions on the right to you being canceled.
Yes, but the good thing is that I don’t give a shit and also I don’t read any of it. So actually, I only know about two [reactions] and I don’t even know why they snuck in. Because I don’t follow any of these people. I knew about Ted Cruz and I knew about Glenn Greenwald. And you know what? His hatred, I breathe it like oxygen. I’m like, give me some more. I’ll take it, I love it, I feed off it.
You’re doing something right if that’s going on.
Exactly. So that was totally fine. But yeah, I 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, so I bounce back from that shit.
I was wondering if, in retrospect, you feel like TBS was maybe not the best fit for what you were trying to do.
No, I will never think that, actually. I think Discovery was not the right fit.
And that was a change that happened more recently.
Here’s why it was great for us at TBS. First of all, they believed in me. When the show started, they really took a chance. They really did. And I’m not going to not give them credit for taking a chance and fighting for the show for many, many years. Because they really, really did. Nobody else was lining up to give me a show. And not to mention, they also gave my husband a show. We had two shows on their network. When we started at TBS, they were trying to create something new and they really took a chance on me and my family. They believed in us. We made great projects with them. And in the end they got swept up in multiple mergers, but I can never take away from them that they really were there for us, and I really, really appreciate that.
Looking back, what are the segments, moments, sketches, things that really stand out in your memory that you think defined what you were trying to do with the show?
I mean, we had so much fun. We did so much crazy stuff that no one had really done before on TV. We said things no one would say, we took wild swings at things. Nobody else was really giving a woman a show where she could just be openly outraged but also make jokes. Dark jokes, fucked-up jokes. I’m proud of that. I think we were a really balls-out show, super risky, ruffled people’s feathers, made people so mad. I’m so proud of the people that we made mad. Our post-election show [in 2016] was awesome. That was really a defining moment where it was like, OK, what is the business of this show? What are we doing? That’s the point where I really went, I think that the purpose of this show now is to plant a flag in what’s right and illuminate that stuff in a comedic way, to the best of my ability, to the best of our abilities, moving forward. Like, let’s just plant a flag in the sand for rightness, for justice. And I don’t know, we tried. And we did it for a long time.
You mentioned the ability to be outraged on TV. And I think that something that you got tagged with a lot was “angry,” which is gendered as well, obviously. Did you think about that while you were making the show, “how angry should I be?”
I mean, probably in fits and starts I did. Occasionally I’d be like, is this too histrionic? Because performance-wise, I was always trying to go, what’s the right amount of this? There’s an alchemy to it. You don’t want to be weeping and self-indulgent. You don’t want to be ridiculous about it; it’s not an opera. But I think just bringing the “Samantha Bee correct level of passion” to something was a balance I always tried to strike. Somewhere between totally histrionic and easy and breezy. You don’t want to be detached. What’s the fucking point of doing a show if you’re totally detached from it? I wouldn’t want to do that. I didn’t think we were going to have seven years of shows to play with. I thought we’d only have like six episodes. So I wanted to use my time wisely and say all the things just in case.
I know especially right after the show ended, there was some talk about bringing it to another network or doing it somewhere else. Is that something that you still think about? Is it still even a possibility?
I don’t really think it’s a possibility. And I’m not even sure that at this point I would—I mean, there are elements of the show that I would want to move forward. First of all, I miss a lot of the people and I miss the expression of it. But I do really miss doing field pieces. It was so joyful for me and such a learning experience for me and I think I’m actually excellent at it. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but it really is my wheelhouse and where I derive the most personal joy as a performer. And so I really miss that. It’s going to feel pretty weird—probably going to feel OK—to not go to the conventions [in 2024] for the first time in my professional life.
So if you were going to launch a new show, you could imagine it being more focused in that direction than on the stand-up monologue side of what you were doing?
I think the truth is, if I work again in television, it’s incumbent on me to really just do the things I want to do. I’m not so desperate to be on screen that I’ll just do anything. I don’t think I’m an appropriate choice to host, like, Let’s Make a Deal—not to disparage, it’s a wonderful program. But I don’t really care for any of that stuff. I’m at the point in my life where I’m like, I really have to like it, I really have to like the team, I really want to do the work. And then I would love to do that. And if not, I will tend to my honey bees.
So we are talking in the middle of this crazy run of The Daily Show guest hosts that’s happening. Did anyone reach out to you about either guest-hosting or being involved in any way in that process?
No, they did not ask me to guest-host, and I’m fine with that. It’s slightly confusing, but it’s fine. That’s OK. That is totally fine.
What would you have said if they had?
I mean, I don’t know. These decisions are not up to me, so I’m just sort of open-hearted about the whole thing and I don’t take it personally. I’m like, well, OK, have fun out there.
I mean, you were certainly mentioned on a lot of lists of possible hosts when Trevor Noah stepped down. And we previously talked about how you were not really considered after Jon Stewart left the show.
But you know what? I care about a lot of people who still work there, so it’s actually a pretty awkward conversation for me to have. I don’t have bitterness about it and I’m just sort of like, I’m going to just be like water and let this flow through me and not really listen to what anybody is saying about it. I don’t listen to what anybody says about it, ever. I don’t go like, “Everybody’s talking about me!” I just don’t. I’m just not going to. I can’t crowdsource my own opinion of myself, in a way, does that make sense?
Well, I guess you don’t want to hear it, but I would have liked to see you at least in that mix.
Well, thank you, Matt, that’s very sweet.
But yeah, it is very strange. Maybe they think you’re too big for it now, I don’t know.
[Laughs] That’s me, too big to fail. I’m a big crypto bank.
In another interview you did recently, I saw you talked about turning down certain opportunities with the “wrong collaborators.” What does that mean for you?
Well, you know, I’m not going to talk specifically about any of them, but things have emerged and it just was not a good fit. And I could feel it. I’ve been in this business for so long that I can feel the way a collaboration is going. It’s not really offensive, but I can feel when someone is working with me but they don’t really like what I do, and they’re trying to merge me with another style. So I have turned down a few things and I’ve gotten out of a few things for those reasons. And I think that the opportunities that I’ve had in the past have enabled me to make choices. You can’t always make these choices. But right now I’m in a position to make these kinds of choices.
That must feel good to be able to say no, because early in your career you really don’t have that ability.
It’s very freeing. And again, it’s not even personal. There was one thing that really wasn’t working out, and I knew it wasn’t working out, and I think that the other team also knew that it wasn’t really working out. But we were on this path, and it just kept moving forward, and so I halted it. I was like, hold on, can we just have a real conversation? I was like, I really don’t think that this is working, I really don’t think this is a good fit, and I’m not even mad about it. And you shouldn’t be mad about it. We shouldn’t be mad at each other, we should just agree that this is not the right fit, this is not the right collaboration, so let’s not do it. Because we have the power to stop it and do things that are a better fit.
It actually was a really freeing and refreshing experience, because we all agreed. I think that we all walked away without any hard feelings by just being truthful about it. In my bones, literally in my DNA, I could feel that it wasn’t going to work and I’m sure they could, too. And so we stopped. And I felt like I took off an invisible backpack and just put it to the side. I was like, I’m going to find collaborators on this project that are going to be the right fit. And ultimately, I think I actually have. It’s a project that I cannot yet announce but I think I’m with the right team now that’s going to really make it work and I’m really excited about it. And again, all these years of working have enabled me to make that choice, but it was a very satisfying choice.
I mean, the upside of your show ending is that you have the freedom to do other things. Beyond the upcoming tour, are there things that you really want to be doing that you just didn’t have time for before or couldn’t imagine being able to do?
Yeah. For one thing, I am rebooting my podcast in a different form. And I’m pretty excited about that because I really enjoyed that. I truly just really enjoy talking to people and interviewing them, so that is something that I’m really, really excited about. And doing it in a way that I want to do it is very important to me. Because I don’t want to just do things for the sake of doing them and I do have the ability to not just do literally everything, at this moment. Talk to me in 15 years, when I’m running a Bingo night.
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
