Samantha Bee should have called Ivanka a feckless country music loving lady.
Brilliant.
Slightly off topic, but I just found this article detailing how a Republican operative is quitting the party, but what stuck out to me was his describing the party as being full of “feckless cowards” which, while not having quite the same punch, is still pretty good wordsmithery.
I never caught Samantha Bee fever, but this clip segment I loved.
I still watch this show through inertia, and am increasingly rethinking that as I type this post. I like her politics, but the Sam Bee show has become aggressively unfunny. It regularly has “jokes” when I audibly go “You paid writers to come up with that? And you did a table read and decided yeah, that was funny, lets put it on the air?” Half the time they’re just references, not even bothering to wrap in the framework of even a bad joke. It’s lazy and insulting.
It doesn’t have the excuse of the Daily Show being on 4x/week. Sam Bee is a weekly program. It shouldn’t be on the air at all. It should be canceled.
This isn’t a post-Trump slump, either. Nor is it a COVID thing. Show hasn’t been funny for at least 2 years. I watch Sam Bee then I watch Desus & Mero, and holy shit, one of those is fresh and fun to watch and one very much is not. Maybe that isn’t fair because D&M don’t have the lofty aspirations and just wants to screw around, but John Oliver is aspirational AF and manages to keep his show entertaining in a way Sam Bee absolutely does not.
I agree. It’s painfully unfunny. (I have some issues with John Oliver as well.)
They both suffer greatly from the lack of an audience, but it’s like Sam Bee’s writing staff does not give the slightest shit.
Being consistently funny for years on end is hard. Comedians often have to take years off, sitcoms will never peak after their third season, bands are never as good ten years after they started, the sequel is always worse than the original, and parents give up after the third kid. Point is, I don’t envy these writers having to pump out this content year in year out, writing jokes about the same topic over and over.
Last Week Tonight is definitely less funny than it used to be, but it’s still worth watching for the substance. I can’t think of any show like this that didn’t decline significantly over time (including colbert and daily show). Like any other TV show they should probably end before it gets stale and then work on a new show with a new format or twist or something.
The Daily Show was consistently funny as long as Stewart led it. He was a great frontman, and the writing staff was energized and on point. Their jokes didn’t always land, but they had 4x as much airtime as Sam Bee and they hit a hell of a lot more often than her show does.
Then once the new guy came in, I found it immediately degraded. The jokes and bits were just as strong as ever, at first, but Noah couldn’t deliver them properly. Perhaps they were written in Stewart’s voice, it isn’t fair to blame Noah entirely, but he does share in it. And they never recovered from that. I stopped watching.
So I don’t know if the problem is Sam Bee, her writers, or both. Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working.
Last Week Tonight is definitely worse than pre-COVID, but IMO, content quality hasn’t degraded. That’s all about the lack of a live audience. Many of his jokes and quips seem to echo in an empty room without the audience response. Bee obviously has the same problem, but her jokes would never have been funny.
Yeah I think with LWT it’s half no audience and half that you can feel that they wrote the jokes remotely. I think a writers’ room really helps weed out stinkers and concentrate the best stuff.
These days LWT is mainly just angry, but so am I, so it kinda works. Also it’s genuinely informative.
The Daily Show, I kinda get the feeling that Noah isn’t outraged in the same way Stewart was.
I’m not sure about that since he seemed pretty invested when I watched a few of the BLM episodes last year…
As for Sam Bee, I also checked out a while ago. Like others have said, for me its also not funny enough and I’m obviously not the target demo, so I moved on.
Still enjoy LWT, but mainly for its investigative news content & not his jokes.
I"m still on Last Week Tonight’s frequency.
Noah still has terrible timing on his jokes, but I really like him when he gets serious, like with the Black Lives Matter movement over last summer.
Right, I just don’t find Noah funny.
Sam Bee, on the other hand, has great comedic timing. She was amazing on the Daily Show. But her own show, the writing is so awful that nobody could make that work.
The feeling I get on many subjects is that Stewart is all in on the “this should be better, it’s America” while Noah hasn’t bought the “it’s America” mindset.
What is wrong with you guys? Is it because you’re not Canadian? I like Sam Bee’s humour.