As we reported on Saturday, TBS late-night host Samantha Bee and her Full Frontal writing partner Jo Miller gave an interview to Wired.com. The interviewer was Virginia Heffernan, who reviewed TV for The New York Times. Heffernan's interview included little sugar cubes of praise:
HEFFERNAN: SNL’s approach: “Just keep laughing at everyone.” I know you have fun here, but you also seem to act on principle and with purpose.
MILLER: Beginning at The Daily Show, we’ve been doing this for a long time, staring into the abyss. You can’t turn away. It’s gonna be a long war. And we have to pull our head out of our American ass. This is a global shift. So it’s important that we tell real stories on our show.
BEE: Everything’s grounded in research and journalism. We have a team of journalists working here, and a fact-checker. We care deeply about facts.
HEFFERNAN: I know we want to draw a bright line between The Onion and Full Frontal on the one hand, and Infowars on the other, but where is that line?
MILLER: We’re not fake news. Like, The Onion is a fake newspaper—that’s its idiom. It’s a parody of a newspaper—the format of it. But on the show, we’re not pretending to be a “news show.”
So how are not pretending to be a news show, but "everything's grounded in research and journalism"? These women are deeply conflicted about what they're making weekly. Are they insult comics? Are they journalists and fact checkers? Are they deep thinkers? They do feel free to mock fellow Turner employees. When Heffernan suggested Wolf Blitzer was an objective journalists with no skin in the game, Miller shot back "Wolf Blitzer is running on Windows 95."
They're not conflicted about how terrible Trump must be taken apart:
HEFFERNAN: What about the metaphorical language you use? Trump talks in something like metaphors, where “more nukes” means “let’s go, Mets” or something. When you say stuff about reproductive rights, like “They have their hands on our vaginas,” is it possible that could be taken literally?
MILLER: But those metaphors of theirs are nonsense. They pretend to be talking in metaphors when they’re in fact lying. What Peter Thiel says about not taking Trump literally is bullshit, and it’s a way of spinning the fact that Trump lied on the campaign trail repeatedly—and made promises that he could not keep, even if he had every intention of keeping them. Why are we having a serious discussion about applying their spin to cover backtracking on unfulfillable promises, and taking that as a lens through which to view comedy?
Not only are they researchers, they're serious readers of....Burke and The Federalist Papers? Does that sound like a left-wing reading list?
HEFFERNAN: You’ve also avoided the flat-out grieving, letting yourselves wallow.
MILLER: I went and read a bunch of memoirs of people who lived in the ’30s. Now we’re reading history books. We’re doing Edmund Burke, Masha Gessen. I’ve also read Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler. It’s time to read The Federalist Papers.
Full Frontal isn't Firing Line. It's designed as a rantfest, a Half-Hour Hate. The women also improbably assert they're not doing the show for an audience. They're only doing it for their own jollies. Is TBS really just in the self-indulgence business? Or are they trying for an audience?
MILLER: The truth is we do the show for us. We don’t care if anybody doesn’t get our references. We don’t care if it goes too fast. We don’t care if you haven’t done the homework.
BEE: Do your homework later. Or not. It doesn’t really matter. It sounds ridiculous and totally disingenuous, but we’re literally doing the show just for ourselves. And I think that is the key to the whole experience. That’s what allows me to completely disconnect from social media. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s just like doing comedy in the back room of a bar.
Wrong. Conservatives would prefer this kind of Insult Comic Dog routine to be stuck in the back of a bar, but it's on TBS.
