Smirking in the Boys’ Room

TV’s newest late-night host.

- Rebecca Traister

It’s about six weeks before her new TBS late-night show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, is set to go on air, and the 46-year-old comedian Samantha Bee is running between editing meetings with her producers, zipping across the street on New York’s west side to Full Frontal’s studio to do a walkthrough, and prepping for her first rehearsal in front of network executives. She swears that her stress is under control—except for the fact that she’s stopped getting her period. “I guess I’m doing a good job of pushing the terror onto my innards,” Bee deadpans, “so that I don’t feel it in my brain.”

It’s safe to say that none of the advance press around Stephen Colbert’s ascension to The Late Show throne included a menstruation anecdote. Which takes us quickly to one of the obvious pressures currently screwing with Samantha Bee’s cycle: She will be the first female steward of a late-night satire show.

Bee’s place in the comedy pantheon doesn’t look quite as exceptional as it might have a few years ago, before the collective mainstream realization that women—even unapologetically feminist women—are indeed hilarious, but Bee’s mission is different from that of successful peers such as Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and Margaret Cho. While these women have often been especially celebrated for eviscerating sexist culture, Bee is trying to also become a voice we trust on topics outside the female condition—electoral politics and global warming and immigration. And to succeed at producing a weekly show that slices headline news to the quick, she must be two things that women are not always embraced for being—very funny and a little angry—and she must be those things while exuding a quality rarely afforded women: authority.