Samantha Bee invites us into her sadness den to try to make sense of this last week
It’s unfortunate that the vagaries of late-night TV scheduling occasionally conspire to keep hosts off the air when they otherwise might really rather be: Take, for example, Samantha Bee, whose TBS series Full Frontal typically takes the lead on righteously funny takedowns of America’s confirmed, loving commitment to institutional misogyny, but who didn’t happen to have a new episode planned for this Thursday or Friday, i.e. the aftermath of this week’s Senate hearings on the viability of would-be Supreme Court justice and accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh.
Luckily (and we don’t say this very often) the internet exists, and so Bee was still able to deliver a monologue on the topic, albeit one delivered from the funfetti-festooned couch of her “sadness den.” The host and comedian hopped on Periscope yesterday to take aim at the proceedings, focusing her ire less on Kavanaugh’s beer-swilling rage-scrunch, and more on the Republican men—guys like Jeff Flake and Lindsay Graham—who spent the last week slapping down a steady drum beat of “Don’t believe women.” Bee’s video is a combination of excoriation, moral support, and unfettered praise for Alyssa Milano’s “rage contouring,” and while it probably won’t make you feel all that better about how the Kavanaugh hearings went down—because the medium of cake-based online video has its limits—it does feel like a useful way to let one of America’s funniest TV personalities do some very angry venting on our behalf.