Samantha Bee no longer has a show on TBS.
Her crudely named late-night comedy show Full Frontal will not return to the network this fall after seven seasons. It’s not a surprising decision, but it highlights the problem with woke comedy.
Bee is an ardent liberal. Her show started in 2016, so naturally, her show had a lot of anti-Donald Trump material. Now that Trump is no longer in the White House and is less relevant in people’s lives than he was from 2016 to 2021, this business model is less lucrative.
Liberal television programming has seen its ratings plummet now that Trump is no longer in the White House. And liberal late-night comedians didn’t make up for the lack of Trump by turning to another unpopular president for jokes, because they’re partisan hacks.
Bee is best known for a couple of insults she made against right-wingers. She called Ivanka Trump the C-word. And she said that a cancer patient attending CPAC had a Nazi haircut. With jokes like that, it’s easy to see why the show didn’t last.
Meanwhile, Bee admitted last year that she intentionally took it easy on President Joe Biden. She said there were “more worthy targets.”
One of those targets is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom she has called racist on Twitter and told to “eat shit.” Hilarious stuff!
In an era when we have a president who can’t even talk, men are dominating women’s sports, and political correctness runs rampant among liberals, there’s plenty of material to mock. Yet liberals such as Bee don’t use their platforms to joke about the ridiculousness of it all.
Instead, viewers got half-baked political commentary on why Bee supports abortion and thinks little children can change their gender — calling abortion access and transgender ideology “human rights.”
So instead of making jokes about a man like Lia Thomas winning NCAA Division 1 national titles in women’s swimming, Bee calls Republicans bigoted for proposing bills to prevent that sort of thing from happening. I fail to see the humor there.
Luckily for Bee’s fans, they’re not missing much. They can get the same opinions from Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, James Corden, and any other late-night TV comedian except for Bill Maher.
Maybe if a Republican wins the 2024 presidential election, there will be a market for Bee’s woke liberal comedy once again. Until then, she can work on some new material.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
