Just one of the hardships we’ll all be facing as responsible coronavirus preparedness keeps our favorite late-night hosts from their studios and armies of support staff is the spectacle of usually ready-for-camera celebrities without makeup or expensive high-def cameras. On Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel broadcast grumpily from his sofa, Stephen Colbert (with salt-and-pepper scruff) from his porch, Trevor Noah in a hoodie, and Jimmy Fallon raising money for out of work Broadway professionals (alongside a Skyped-in Lin-Manuel Miranda) from his empirically cool family playroom.
Still, if there’s one thing that Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee has stressed since taking over her own weekly hosting gig in 2016, it’s that a woman in the traditionally male-dominated late-night game has to be on her game, all the time. That’s why, on Bee’s own on-the-fly web content in lieu of her regularly scheduled Wednesday show, Beeing At Home, the host emerged fully made up and camera-ready, right from the rustic woodshed on her property for some handy social distancing frontier tips. One: chop your own wood, as Bee effortfully did, picking up some hefty scrap trunks and hacking away with a very heavy and sharp-looking axe. (Insert montage of Samantha Bee invoking every curse word TBS won’t usually let her use on-air.) Then, taking a breather from her dangerously unapt “cavewoman toil,” Bee moved on to her second piece of sequestering advice: don’t be a dick.
Or, rather, don’t be “an unbleached asshole,” since, as Bee put it, all this end-times, disaster movie, “Defcon shit my pants-level” national anxiety has exposed just which Americans will almost immediately turn into that one sniveling jackass in the zombie movie who locks everyone else out of the root cellar because he thinks he can survive on the pickled okra down there. (Nice try dumbass—you forgot to check the closet, and now you’re the lunch.) Noting that, in the supermarket-emptying frenzy that’s occurred since people stopped listening to Donald Trump and Fox News downplay the crisis so’s not to wound Trump’s soap-bubble ego, “the beanie baby of today is a two-ounce bottle of Purell,” Bee decried those who’ve been hoarding products their neighbors need to stay healthy and then price-gouging said neighbors for them, perhaps attempting to set up some sort of Immortan Joe-style wasteland hand sanitizer and bleach wipes fiefdom. Well, at least Bee is here to take them to task and, after much, much swearing, finally split that stubborn piece of wood in twain, guaranteeing untold minutes of warmth.