Gabriel Hays at FoxNews.com reports that Samantha Bee was singled out by longtime Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels as something to avoid in political comedy. It’s an anecdote in a forthcoming book by Susan Morrison titled Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.
The memoir quotes Michaels, stating, "It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan. We have our biases, we have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee."
Reportedly, the book follows Michaels’ quote by clarifying that he "meant one-sided and strident" about Bee, whose weekly TBS show Full Frontal was a raging feminist “comedy” spectacle until they canceled it in 2022.
Bee now appropriately co-hosts The Daily Beast Podcast, since that website is also a hangout for ranting lefties.
Bee somehow imagined that Lorne Michaels somehow made Donald Trump the president (as opposed to the Celebrity Apprentice producers at NBC.) “Imagine calling anyone strident when you have built a career of elevating the loudest guy in the room.”
"I get referenced in the book as being someone that [Michaels] does not want to emulate in any way,” Bee lamented, but she added: “I concede the point. He’s right. I am one-sided. And I am strident, and proudly so."
This pained Bee since she's a longtime fan of the show. "As a young kid, it felt like an illicit pleasure. It’s just all in my consciousness and I love it. I love the performers, I love the writers, I love the writing."
In other words, Lorne isn’t accurate when he pretends SNL is somehow nonpartisan.
Last September, Christian Toto mocked Michaels for his claim: “You can’t lecture the audience, which most of politics is now, people lecturing the audience. Ours is like, yeah, there are kind of idiots on both sides. And we’re not going to do anything that didn’t work at dress [rehearsal]. It has to play. It has to be comedy. We’re first and foremost a comedy show.”
That hasn’t always been the case. Toto recalled their sappy tributes to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Alec Baldwin’s foam-flecked caricature of Trump wasn’t comedy. It may have been therapy. Current cast member James Austin Johnson’s Trump is more comedic.
Shortly before her show was aborted, Bee demonstrated her strident devotion to abortion on demand, suggesting they "#RaiseHell" in civil disobedience after an aspiring assassin showed up on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's street. (Her show was canceled a few weeks later.)
It is insane that a Supreme Court that doesn’t represent a majority of Americans will cause women more death and suffering….I can’t describe how painful it is to be here now in a place where the Supreme Court has the power to erase 50 years of constitutional law. Make no mistake, this is not where it ends. Conservatives will not rest until they have come for all of our rights….And we have to raise hell in our cities, in Washington, in every restaurant Justice [Samuel] Alito eats at for the rest of his life, because if Republicans have made our lives hell, it’s time to return the favor.
