Sam Bee brings the snark
Samantha Bee’s live “Full Frontal” event in Washington certainly was no White House correspondents’ dinner. There was no president, at least a sitting one, and there wasn’t really dinner (hors’ d’oeuvres, mostly).
But that’s what she promised with her “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” which taped hours before Saturday’s formal event across town and was scheduled to air on TBS Saturday night at 10 p.m.
As attendees dressed in formal wear waited in the sweltering heat to get inside of DAR Constitution Hall, climate-change protesters were marching just blocks away on a parade to the White House.
Inside, Bee spent more than an hour paying homage to a free and functional press (“from the failing New York Times to the failing pile of garbage Buzzfeed” to Pro-Publica, which “sounds Mexican“); skewering sensational media practices and evoking an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton is commander-in-chief and George W. Bush delivers President Donald Trump takedowns.
Which is to say: Will Ferrell showed up as a surprise special guest to reprise his famed Dubya impersonation.
“How do you like me now?” he drawled to the roaring audience. “The prodigal son has returned. I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s positive. It’s very prodigal.”
Bee — who confessed to the audience this was the largest crowd she’s performed in front of — basically delivered a bigger, more elaborate and live version of her weekly show. The TBS host has found her place in the crowded late-night landscape with a scorchedearth, brutally comedic approach to politics, with Trump and his supporters as a primary target.
“I know it looks like we have a cash bar,” she joked, in one pointed reference, “but as I promised on the invitation, at a later date I will get Mexico to pay for your drinks.”
And in a gibe at the president’s media habits, she said Trump “has tweeted more about ‘Fox and Friends’ since being elected than he’s tweeted about Tiffany.”
Addressing journalists, Bee said that “as much as I love poking at the media, I know your job has never been harder: You basically get paid to stand in a cage while a geriatric orangutan gets to scream at you — it’s like a reverse zoo.”
There were a slew of celebrity guests: The singer Peaches performed, and George Takei and Patton Oswalt made cameos in pretaped segments.
Bee didn’t hold back on cable news, blasting CNN President Jeff Zucker’s comments comparing politics to sports and imploring his cable network not to air “loyal partisan hacks who make us noticeable dumber.”