Queen Bee-I-T-C-H
Canadian Daily Show correspondent hasn’t lost her sting
BY Charles Demers
Photography by Norman Jean Roy
Samantha Bee’s baby daughter, Piper, has just attempted to swallow a plastic blowfish. “It’s so adorable; I wish you could see it,” she says over the phone from New York. And then, referencing an earlier exchange about the technological superiority of her TiVo-accessorized adoptive country (Bee can no longer watch regular TV without trying to pause and rewind), the Toronto native adds: “They’ve got these things down here, videophones.”
You don’t need a videophone to see Samantha Bee’s work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, nor—thanks to repeat broadcasts throughout the day, often back-to-back with its spin-off hit, The Colbert Report—do you need TiVo. The Daily Show-Colbert Report juggernaut has become such a force of nature among those left out of George Bush’s Red State America that some have taken to wearing t-shirts that read “Stewart/Colbert ’08.” When I ask our Canadian star which cabinet post she might expect in such an administration, she insists that she would be “fired immediately.”
The t-shirts are, of course, indicative of a growing trend among a certain demographic of the young and sardonic who turn to The Daily Show as their primary source of news. And though Stewart is more hawkish than the average Canadian on issues such as Afghanistan and Iran, many of us are turning nightly to The Daily Show to understand the goings-on down south, as a sort of crazy-to-sane dictionary. Samantha Bee is unimpressed by this development.
“It’s the wrong impulse,” she deadpans. “You need to be getting your news about the States from Fox.”
Canadian performers have long held pride of place among the ranks of those satirizing America, from Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels and the SCTV gang through to Phil Hartman and Mike Myers. From her vantage point as part of this hallowed pantheon of comic performers, Bee invokes the spirit of CanLit in order to explain how we did it: “During our long, cold winters, we think of funny things to say while we play our fiddles next to a roaring fire.” Even so, it doesn’t take a fiddle or a fire to realize the potential for satire packed into every White House press conference by an administration seemingly built to meet the needs of left-leaning humourists. “I think it’s getting easier. There’s a lot of good stuff going on for the amateur satirist.”
“We’re so similar,” she says of Canadians and Americans, “but there are things that are done differently” in the States, and “they’re mind-blowing.” Bee cites anti-abortion vigils at State Houses, as well as her myriad interviewees who reference Satan as an existing being, “coloured red, with goat’s feet. It’s so literal.”
But, she insists, “I love Americans. I love America.” For their part, the Yanks are divided on whether or not they reciprocate the warm feelings. While she’s adored by The Daily Show’s legions of fans, some of the program’s victims aren’t so fond. When Jason Jones, the show’s only other Canadian-born correspondent, recently went to an interview, his interviewee said, with relief, “Thank God they didn’t send Samantha Bee. She is a B-I-T-C-H.” After the interview, Jones went home and told the story to his wife—Samantha Bee.
Those of us who thrill to Bee’s caustic wit and sarcasm (her B-I-T-C-Hiness, if you will) needn’t worry that parenthood will soften her approach; if anything, she says, she’s “gone to a very low place” on the show, compensating for the fact that she is “so much happier, or more joyful” in her life, by going after her targets with reinvigorated gusto. Or perhaps it’s just the pressures of motherhood driving her to new levels of impatience with the boors and buffoons on the other side of the microphone. “I’m like, ‘I gotta get home to the baby. What’s your fucking problem?’ ”
