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Samantha Bee is going where Jon Stewart and John Oliver never did
| Vox | - |
For
the most part, The Daily Show and its children (a family tree Full
Frontal belongs to, along with HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)
have done their best to appear at least slightly objective. When former
Daily Show host Jon Stewart endorsed ...
Samantha Bee is going where Jon Stewart and John Oliver never did
Here’s how she’s breaking the mold that Stewart set up and Oliver perfected
Every Sunday, we pick a new episode of the week. It
could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can
read the archives here. The episode of the week for June 26 through July 2 is the latest installment of TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
The most remarkable moment of the latest episode of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee wasn’t when Bee ripped into Brexit. It wasn’t when David Tennant, the former Doctor Who
star, read tweets excoriating Donald Trump in his thick Scottish
accent. It wasn’t even when Bee’s graphics team pasted Trump’s face onto
that of a Weeping Angel, one of Doctor Who’s most dreaded monsters.
No, it was when Bee asked her viewers to visit the
website for their state’s board of elections and make sure their voter
registration was up to date. "Take this election seriously!" Bee
implored, and it was as forceful as anything else she said during the
episode.
It also marked a substantial break from tradition, even if it didn’t seem like it. For the most part, The Daily Show and its children (a family tree Full Frontal belongs to, along with HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) have done their best to appear at least slightly objective.
When former Daily Show host Jon Stewart
endorsed John Kerry in 2004, he didn’t come out and encourage his
viewers to vote for Kerry. Instead, he noted that George W. Bush had
made it really easy to do his job as a comedian poking fun at politics,
and said he would prefer it if, in the next four years, said job was
really hard. He just toed the line when it came to outright endorsement.
But Bee doesn’t see political discussion as a semi-polite
fight, where the most reasonable voice in the room will carry the day.
No, she sees it as war.
Who’s better: John Oliver or Samantha Bee?
HBO
Bee’s call to action crystallized something I’ve been
thinking about since her show debuted back in February, and "Who do you
think is better, John Oliver or Samantha Bee?"
became a topic of debate among TV fans. (It should go without saying
that question persists only because both hosts have launched such
terrific shows.)
I’ve always preferred Bee. I find her jokes funnier, I
find her material more invigorating, and I find her show’s point-of-view
more exciting. It’s not that I dislike Oliver — whose show is sometimes the very best on television — but that something in Full Frontal’s DNA just speaks to me on a primal level.
And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve
realized that my preference for Bee stems directly from how frequently
Bee essentially declares that the only way anybody will ever succeed in
making this world a better place is by fighting for it.
Full Frontal is angry, as my colleague Caroline Framke has pointed out, but so was Stewart’s Daily Show. The difference is that Stewart’s Daily Show seemed to believe that much of what makes us angry is, in some ways, intractable. We can’t fix the world, but we can make jokes about it.
Bee, however, will frequently lash out at her audience of
presumably young, presumably hip, presumably progressive viewers and
say that we can’t blame all of the world’s problems on some horrible
political system — Republican, Democrat, or otherwise. Instead, she
proposes that all of us are at fault, even you, and that if we don’t do something, things are only going to get worse.
Bee avoids the comedy of flattery so many of her peers fall into
TBS
This sets Bee apart from pretty much everyone else —
including Oliver, whose comedy is by and large designed to flatter the
audience. The implication of any given Last Week Tonight
segment is that even if you don’t know already know what Oliver is
talking about, you will be a better person for learning it, and because
you are receptive to what he is talking about, you will be able
to absorb important information and carry it forth to be more
knowledgeable about the world around you.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach, especially
since Oliver usually turns his spotlight on issues that get about
one-thousandth of the attention reserved for the political horse race
(something Bee covers extensively). But I can never escape the sense
that Last Week Tonight’s default position is that if you know
this stuff, you are a better human being, and that by simply becoming
better informed, you are superior to those who hear Oliver’s message and
reject it.
The reason for this is simple: Oliver rarely draws the
connection between the horrible injustices he’s reporting on and how we
at home either profit from or indirectly support them.
When he discusses, say, medical debt,
it’s with the implication that medical debt is just one of the world’s
many ills, one that we should probably get around to fixing someday, but
also one that will require sustained political action, probably from
somebody else, to truly solve.
This approach — knowing about stuff is more important,
ultimately, than doing stuff — is very much in keeping with the
traditional role of the comedian as a detached, amused observer. But
it’s also a recipe for viewer ego-stroking, especially in an era when TV
audiences are self-selected niches who seek out programs that will
speak to their partisan opinions.
And that creates the kind of world where pieces like this Jimmy Kimmel sketch
(which asks the audience to gawk and laugh at random passersby who hate
Hillary Clinton but keep getting tripped up in their own ignorance and
hypocrisy) are greeted as hilarious instead of cruel. Because we’re on
the "right" team, and we know all the "right" information, we can feel
comfortable in our righteousness.
Oliver, of course, doesn’t stoop that low. His show is
still adventurous, ambitious, and frequently very funny. But it exists
on the same continuum of suggesting to the audience that signaling
you’re on the side of the good guys is more important than trying to
understand why somebody else might disagree with you.
And don’t get me wrong. Samantha Bee thinks everybody who
disagrees with her is completely and totally incorrect — if not utterly
idiotic. She frequently presents those who oppose her own political
positions as enemies in the grinding trench war she’s waging.
But because she also views them as actual
opponents, rather than uneducated folks who only need to hear the right
information (laced with jokes!) to see the light, she weirdly grants
them more respect. The only way to defeat them is to overturn the system
itself.
Thus, she’s not terribly interested in coddling her
audience. This is the world all of us have built, she posits, and if
we’re going to make it better, it will be together.
How gender affects all of this
TBS
I should probably mention the detail that most people usually open with when talking about Full Frontal: Samantha Bee is the only current late-night talk show host who is a woman. (We’re going to pretend Netflix’s Chelsea doesn’t exist, because the idea of a "late-night show" existing on a platform that doesn’t have timeslots is madness.)
And where most of the ensuing conversations treat this as
a welcome change, or an intriguing novelty, or even a strike back
against industry sexism, I think her gender is intrinsic to why she’s
been able to so radically push past the usual Stewart/Oliver playbook.
Put simply, the effects of institutional sexism —
something especially noticeable for women in theoretically progressive
realms like the entertainment industry — affect all women in one way or
another. Their political leanings, the level of education they have, how
feminist their male bosses claim to be — none of that matters. They all
have to deal with it sooner or later.
Stewart and Oliver can say to their viewers, "Well, hey,
if you have this information, you might be able to understand how the
world is filled with problems and issues, and that might be helpful for
you," because to a real degree, as rich, white male comedians, they
don’t have to deal with it. It’s interesting, but it’s not vital.
Bee, however, is constructing the first season of Full Frontal to serve as a blanket condemnation of an entire political system where everybody is lazily comfortable with their privilege.
Some of the topics she covers are clearly of less
interest to her than others; you can tell when she really comes alive
(early episodes dealing with Texas’s restrictive abortion laws
— recently struck down by the Supreme Court — snarled with sharp
teeth). Her segments on race and class, especially, occasionally suffer
from "Well, that’s unfortunate!" syndrome, just a bit. But she doesn’t
just feign concern for most of this stuff abstractly; she feels like she has skin in the game.
Of course, that means those who disagree with Bee
politically are going to find something else to watch. But in an
environment of political and cultural niches, she seems fine with that
(and her ratings are solid, so she doesn’t need them anyway).
The days when a Walter Cronkite could sway national
opinion on the Vietnam War, or even when a Jon Stewart could take a Jim
Cramer to task, are pretty much over. What’s left behind, Bee’s
suggests, is a kind of endless, grinding battle, one that will outlive
all of us but one that is necessary if we’re ever going to live in a
better world.
She doesn’t want to make her job harder, as Stewart
famously did when he semi-endorsed Kerry. She wants to make her job
unnecessary, impossible as that might seem.
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee airs Monday nights at 10:30 pm Eastern on TBS.
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