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As it turns out Sam Bee’s most viral piece wasn’t even broadcast. From The Guardian–

One of your most popular segments on Full Frontal speculated that Trump can’t actually read, which now has 4m-plus views. How hard was it to find evidence?

That was a personal theory of a couple of people on our research team. They brought it up a few times and we were like: “OK, well, put together a package of research.” And, as soon as you looked at it, you were like: “It’s undeniable.” It was the most tightly constructed research package that was created with just so much passion and integrity. It’s funny – we didn’t even put that segment on the air with the television show; we put it on the web and it took on a life of its own because you can’t even look away.

As you know, at DocuDharma and The Stars Hollow Gazette we publish only the most scurrilous of rumors, and “journalism”?

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.- Stockton

Reading is so Gutenberg anyway

The Guardian (op. cit.)-

You’ve just come back from a field report in Iraqi Kurdistan. Was that an eye-opening trip?

It absolutely was. Kurdistan is its own thing: you’re very close to Mosul but you’re not in Mosul – it’s relatively safe. The restaurants are great, it’s not a hardship to be in Kurdistan whatsoever. It was quite lovely. And we were able to tell the stories we wanted to tell, from adjacent to the front lines. I don’t think I’m brave for going to Kurdistan, for eating delicious food and meeting great people.

I’m a Late Night TV host. Impressed?

No.

The Guardian (ibid.)-

Full Frontal has been called “the most mercilessly feminist show (ever) (in history)”. Is there an agenda or do you just cover the stories you’re interested in?

Yes, that’s all it is. We don’t pass stories through feminist filters – we just do the stories that speak to us and stories that speak to us in a certain way may not speak to a male host in the same way. Or they may not feel they have the authority to tell that story and I think that’s perfectly fine. We tell the stories that we feel passionately about and often those stories are about women for sure, because that’s how we’ve lived. That’s how I’ve lived. I’ve been steeped in woman-ness since I was born.

Lady Justice- such a nasty woman

Samantha Bee, the new heroine of American political satire
by Tim Lewis, The Guardian
Sunday 13 August 2017

Samantha Bee, a 47-year-old Canadian-born dual-citizen of Canada and the US, has been called the “comedian of the resistance” in the Donald Trump era. It is not a position she applied for, nor one she is especially happy to have assumed. When her weekly topical show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, first aired on the US cable channel TBS in February 2016, in the process making her the first woman to host a late-night political satire, she imagined she would be overseeing the run-in to a Hillary Clinton presidency. Then, from her perspective, the unthinkable happened.

Trump’s victory has forced all the late-night comedy shows to take stock, but it is Bee, formerly a correspondent on The Daily Show for a record 12 years, who seems to have adapted best. She is withering in her dismay at “that pint of flat orange Fanta”, as she’s called Trump, and “the batshit telenovela” that is his administration.

Meanwhile, Full Frontal increased its viewership by 167% in its first year and became late-night television’s No 1 show with millennials (adults aged 18 to 34), leapfrogging Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and James Corden. Earlier this year, Bee featured on the Time 100 list of most influential people in the world and last month Full Frontal was nominated for seven Emmys.

Now what I wanted was for Sam and Jason to take over The Daily Show and make it over in Eyewitness/Happy News format. Alas, not to be. Sam thinks it would be a drag anyway.

Doing a show four nights a week is a major grind – I’m not sure why anybody wants to do it. So I can see from that point of view that no one looked at it and went: “Oh, that seems appealing. What I’ll do is surrender all my freedom and spare time to this creative machine that goes on for ever.” So we tried to build a show that would also somewhat permit us to have a life that we could live. But I hope that we can all see now and acknowledge that you can put a lady at the helm of a show and it’s fine. It’s totally OK. You don’t even have to think about it any more, it just is.