Sam Bee and Adam Rippon host the holiday civil rights pageant Full Frontal's I.C.E. On Ice
Wednesday’s pre-holidays Full Frontal saw host Samantha Bee turning her rage-laugh rundown of the weekly horrors perpetrated by the person currently in the White House into a full-blown holiday pageant. On ice. About I.C.E. Taking on the newly empowered and emboldened government bureau the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its role as Donald Trump’s gleefully white supremacist shock troops, Bee and a non-stop parade of celebrity pals spent a commercial-free half hour tackling the abuses I.C.E. are regularly perpetrating on orders from that game show host scam artist accidentally made president thanks to Russian help and white-hot white American racism. But on ice!
There’s a fashion line to sell festive gear and raise money for the child immigrant rights organization KIND (Kids In Need Of Defense—text 40649 to donate). There was a “We Are The World”-style ode to eggnog (featuring the likes of Jon Stewart, Patton Oswalt, Eric Andre, Bellamy Young, Nico Young, Olivia Munn, and Pretty In Pink pals Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer). Bee and her Full Frontal bucks even remodeled a house to facilitate the work of immigration lawyers working to represent detainees, and to temporarily house detainees’ families. But, since Bee was putting the ice in I.C.E. On Ice, the showstopper was the ice pageant itself, a skating paen to fighting injustice, complete with help from Bee’s husband, former Daily Show colleague, and guy who knows how to take a fall on skates, Jason Jones.
Alongside bantering host and Olympic medalist skater Adam Rippon, Bee presided over an ice dancing extravaganza where the gliding immigrants of her Full Frontal Abolish I.C.E. Skaters were constantly imperiled by Jones in full I.C.E. gear, barreling around as the worst possible person you can run into while enjoying a holiday free skate—“a hockey douche.” While Rippon and Bee narrated the on-ice action of Jones bullying peaceful skaters and pretending his stick is his penis, they also outlined several ways in which people can fight back against what Bee termed “the excesses of immigration and customs enforcement.”
Like the fact that you don’t have to let I.C.E. agents into you home without an ID and a signed warrant. (Cue Jones’ frustrated agent futilely pegging pucks at a closed door.) Or that it’s completely legal to publicize I.C.E. activity in your community through social media. (Jones lunges after forewarned subjects, hurling himself into some conveniently placed boxes.) Or the good old American tactic of pressuring community leaders (and electing others) who will refuse to cooperate with a ranting old bigot’s attempts to deport every scary brown person until he and his MAGA minions feel safe and cozy in their bigotry. It’s a Full Frontal Christmas miracle—or at least, as Bee promised in her opening, it’s one final 2018 attempt to make viewers’ hearts “swell with goodwill for your fellow human beings if it is the last fuckin’ thing I do!”