Samantha Bee doesn’t have a desk. It is just one of the clear, immediately-apparent things that sets her Full Frontal apart from the rest of the late night hosts. Instead of adopting the stately authority that comes from that classic anchor posture — or mocking that authority, in the Daily Show/Colbert Report tradition that John Oliver maintains over at Last Week Tonight — Bee stands for the entirety of her half-hour TBS show, allowing her to express full-body outrage.
The stance gives her show a specific, almost manic energy that aligns with the tenor of Bee’s comedy: She is not passively absorbing the events of the day, nor is she claiming any false objectivity. She, literally, does not take the indignities of the previous week sitting down, whether those are legislative assaults on women’s rights or an AR-15-fueled assault on Pulse in Orlando early Sunday morning.
In his monologue on The Late Show, Colbert lamented that mass shootings are so common we’ve developed a “national script” for the occasion, one that even he seemed unable to avoid. “I think that by accepting the script, we tacitly accept that the script will end the same way every time, with nothing changing, except for the loved ones and the families of the victims, for whom nothing will ever be the same.”
Colbert was right, not just about a national script — shock, sorrow, thoughts and prayers, spike in gun sales, political inaction, rinse, repeat — but a late night one. The genre, disgusting as it is to realize that such a thing exists, has a format: Funny men drop their jokes to stare solemnly at the camera, their voices steady, their intentions pure. Sometimes they are overcome with emotion, and so, too, are we. Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O’Brien’s Monday night monologues fit this mold.
This can be powerful and beautiful and right. Think of Stewart’s Daily Show monologue after the church shooting in Charleston. His job, he said then, is a simple one, of reading the news, making jokes and funny faces, and then, “cha-ching! I’m out the door.” But on that day in June, “I didn’t do my job today. So, I apologize. I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina. And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could’ve pulled out of the spiral, but I didn’t. And so, I honestly have nothing. Other than, just sadness.”
Stewart had been relying on that structure since his first show after 9/11. He began by asking his audience, “Are you okay? We pray that you are and that your family is. I’m sorry to do this to you. It’s another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought speech of a shaken host, and television is nothing if not redundant.” He called those introductions “something that we do for ourselves, so that we can drain whatever abscess is in our hearts and move on to the business of making you laugh.”
It was an unintentionally prescient description of what American audiences could expect in the 15 years to follow. Maybe it is the fact not that the speeches are overwrought — some of them are, of course, but some are as thoughtfully written and delivered as could be expected under the circumstances — but just that they are so common that made Bee’s choice of introduction for Full Frontal this Monday night feel so cathartic and sharp.
Her monologue was a necessary, guttural scream in a nation exhausted by moments of silence. Bee appeared onstage in the kind of leather motorcycle jacket you wear when you want to feel like you could pick and win a fight with anybody. She did not abandon the basic structure of her show; she didn’t drop humorous diversions for heartfelt delivery. Hers was a hybrid.
“After a massacre, the standard operating procedure is that you stand onstage and deliver some well-meaning words about how we will get through this together, how love wins, how love conquers hate, and that is great. That is beautiful. But you know what? Fuck it. I am too angry for that. Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems.”
She aired a C-SPAN clip of Senator Christopher Murphy relating this stomach-dropping statistic: “There were 370 instances in 2015 where more than four people were shot at one given time, more than one per day.”
“Hey!” Bee said. “Is it okay if, instead of making jokes I just scream for seven minutes until we go to commercial? No? It’s not okay? Okay, here we go.”
The six minutes that followed broke open the idea that a person (especially a woman) cannot be emotional and analytical at the same time. Bee goes point by point through the frequency of mass shootings in the United States, the troubling-to-say-the-least backstory of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, the velocity of violence unleashed from Mateen’s weapon of choice — 45 rounds a minute — the enormous loopholes would-be terrorists leap through to legally buy guns in this country, existential questions about the tension between freedom and security, and the normalization of mass shootings.
She did all this while landing much-needed, fantastic laughs at the expense of Mateen’s depressing, unflattering mirror selfies; guns like the AR-15 which Bee deems “high-capacity penis substitutes”; Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who avoided telling reporters what could be done to prevent another tragedy like this from occurring (“If only shooting victims could dodge bullets as deftly as you dodged that question!”); and Second Amendment-writer James Madison (“Congratulations on your Tony, but you really fucked us with that one.”)
“Stop thinking,” she said, channeling the fury that so many feel in the aftermath of the worst mass shooting in American history. “And do something to improve our society.”