Samantha Bee Returns to Ridicule Trump and Sessions
Samantha Bee returned for her first Full Frontal of the new year, on a new day — she’s now on Wednesday nights. It turned out to be an awfully eventful evening to put together a political-satire show. President-elect Donald Trump’s appalling press conference that morning, plus congressional hearings on some of Trump’s potential appointees, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general, ate up her half-hour.
Related: Full Frontal With Samantha Bee: Behind the Scenes of Five of the Show’s 2016 News Hits
Bee gets some of her best effects from being artfully rude and in pointing out absurd contradictions designed to shame the targets of her satire. But this week, the real events nearly overtook Bee’s ability to joke about them. She grappled with the details of the now-notorious leaked dossier containing salacious but unverified details about Trump, searching for ways to create humor from the torrent of urine jokes that have already been made about a few of the Russian-derived particulars. It turned out Trump’s press conference remark — “I’m also very much of a germaphobe” — was as ridiculously funny as anything Bee could craft. Then too, Trump’s attack on a CNN reporter was so beyond amusement that Bee was left to comment on how it may have marked “the end of a free press.”
In her second segment, on the Jeff Sessions session for attorney general, Bee got off some standard jokes about older Southern whites with a presumed history of bigotry, but little of it stuck without any soundbite at hand to prove accusations of his racism. It’s hard to make hilarious television when you have to parse Senate transcripts for Sessions’s voting record and tease out the implications of it. As Trump nears entry to the White House, Bee’s job may become harder.
On Wednesday night, it may have been Jimmy Kimmel who did as good a job as anyone at summing up Trump’s press conference, chopping it down to the parts that were hostile, inarticulate, and vulgar.
But inviting your audience to laugh at the press conference as merely a wild ride and saying it’s going to be a crazy four years, as Kimmel did in conclusion, also does them a disservice in inviting them to merely shrug off what went on in Trump Land on Wednesday as more silly, what-can-you-do shenanigans.
Full Frontal With Samantha Bee airs Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. on TBS. Jimmy Kimmel Live airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on ABC.
