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Honoring Samantha Bee
Tonight the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS, or SATAN spelled backwards) will honor Samantha Bee during their 11th Annual Television Academy Honors. This is one day after Miss Bee referred to the President’s daughter — on air — as “a feckless [expletive that refers to a part of a woman’s anatomy].”
Bee, and her network TBS, have tepidly apologized for the remark. “I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it,” tweeted Bee. The network added, “Samantha Bee has taken the right action in apologizing for the vile and inappropriate language she used about Ivanka Trump last night. Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake too, and we regret it.”
And it truly was a team effort. Turner has a Standards and Practices Office like the broadcast nets. All scripts, monologues, etc., are run through this office. (Listen to the GLoP episode at AEI.) Which means Bee’s comments were not on par with Roseanne Barr’s spur-of-the-moment idiocy on Valerie Jarrett. No, this makes it 10 times worse. It was conceived in a writer’s room, approved by executive producers and blessed by the network itself. Jim Spann, the head of S&P for Turner Entertainment Networks, once appeared on “Conan” to defend his office’s censoring of some of that show’s content.
Now, on to the Academy. These awards are separate from the Academy’s main raison d’être, the annual Emmy Awards. The purpose of these awards, according to Television Academy Chairman and CEO Hayma Washington, is to applaud those that use television as “a catalyst for raising awareness of relevant issues around the globe. We are proud to be part of an industry that spreads understanding, uncovers truth, encourages compassion and shines a light on darkness.”
Understanding. Truth. Compassion. Light. Yeah, Samantha Bee is all that and more.
From the Academy website, here are the reasons NATAS specifically chose to honor Bee and her show:
“Through the use of old fashioned journalistic integrity, plain logic, keen observational skills, and pop culture references, Full Frontal is a program that makes its audience think and laugh.
“Four days a week, Bee exercises 22 minutes of remarkable public courage. She is outspoken, yet implements tact. She gives respect where respect is due. She is willing to take on the uncomfortable, willing to dive into the gutter and embrace it as laughable common ground.
“But Full Frontal with Samantha Bee doesn’t just serve to inform and amuse. What Toronto native Bee and her team are doing is far more important and complex than just delivering the news or just writing a funny joke about a politician.
“It is no longer enough to simply know what’s going on, as great a challenge as that can be on its own. It is now essential to take the next step.”
Tact?
The Academy now not only honors the gutter, it, too, embraces it. And the “next step” is to fill the gutter full of runoff from a pig farm before diving in with a closed mind and an open mouth.
Maybe I should take my Emmy down from the mantle and mail it back to them.
Published in Culture
Fire them all.
Well said. And if you ever told someone on the Left that they were the Dark Side they would be incredulous. They have no clue what they have become.
Can’t help feeling that Samantha B Word has learned well the lesson that the fastest way to revive a moribund 21st century career is to pull a cunning stunt like this, because it, and you, are all that people will be talking about for days on end. Who cares about North Korea, China, trade wars, even global warming anymore, right? Let’s talk about Samantha B Word all day.
Time to stop glorifying and rewarding, even with overhyped opprobrium, the foul-mouthed and classless trolls that seem to have taken over what passes for the entertainment industry.
When Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Barack Obama received Nobel Peace Prizes while Ronald Reagan was overlooked I was cured of respecting future “awards”. They all seem to be a bunch of liberals patting each other on the back, a total waste of time.
I’m not sure which came first …if this is a chicken or egg situation… but as a one time Lefty I can tell you that the Left used to be incredibly fractured. There were small but dedicated adherents to many varied single-issues. So there were the Snail Darter people and the Spotted Owl people and the Whale people and SealPup people and Earth Firsters and on and on and on. None of these groups necessarily agreed with each other but their cooperation was critically necessary. If the SealPup people wanted to have a rally/protest and wanted more than their own 30 members to show up … they needed the cooperation of all the other groups. It was a big quid pro quo.
You come to our thing. We’ll come to yours. So whatever the event, there’d always Be a big crowd.
That started morphing into a more regimented “thou shall not speak ill of thy fellow Lefty’s group” and now has gone so far that you are expected to voice full throated support for anything anybody on you side of the line says or does. Because they can and will shun you, un-person you and your cause – in a heartbeat.
If an unfunny comedian receives an award at a show no one watches, will she still be honored?
For me, there is a self adoring love fest award show on about every week. I don’t watch any of them…well, there is one exception–The Tony’s. I have found them to be apolitical and very talented.
I hate Samantha Bee, and what she said. Especially her allusion to incest, so beneath contempt.
But I am really far more concerned about this ‘off with their heads’ movement, where if a comedian makes a controversial or offensive joke or comment they are immediately removed from public view, stamped with a scarlet A and become non persons.
Lenny Bruce, where are you when we need you?
It has gone too far. Sure, I hate most of the left wing comedians and their vile attacks on anything conservative. I don’t watch the daily show or politically incorrect or that tripe. But if some like that, so be it.
Kathy Griffith’s decapitation fantasy was vile. But that was pretty much Kathy Griffith’s style, being vile. Can’t we condemn hateful and offensive instances without erasing the performer from society?
Roseanne’s comments were very offensive to some. I get that. But that doesn’t mean that her long history of making successful comedy TV should be trashed. Samantha Bee is a political idiot who is willfully offensive. But that doesn’t mean she should not have her show, if it is successful. Let the public decide with their choices, don’t make that choice for them.
I highlight this stuff because, quite frankly, it’s all a gigantic donation to the President’s re-election campaign. They think they’re “resisting,” but… please! In the span of two weeks you get that no one should call a murderous gangbanger an “animal” but that calling the President’s daughter an incestuous [redacted] is award-caliber political discourse. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Hey, locked rooms can have lightbulbs.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word. It used to be the correct English word for Female reproductive anatomy, until the dang Normans invaded and ruined everything. There were streets in England that had that word in their names!
Everthing started to go downhill after 1066, I’m tellin’ ya.
;-)
The Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel still has some value.
Ditto for the Fields Medal.
(At this point, however, the Nobel Prizes for Physics and for Chemistry should probably be merged into a single prize. The line between chemistry and physics is razor-thin these days.)
Apropos of nothing, on behalf of all Canuckistan I would like to thank the United States of America for taking Samantha Bee off our hands. It’s an act of charity that goes above and beyond the terms of our joint membership in NATO.
Indeed there were. Some, quite famous. At a time when it was still common practice for English street names to reflect the trades that were carried on (Baker Lane, Silver Street, Potter Street, Fisher Row, and so on), there were streets in just about every town indicating that the principal activity pertaining therein was that which could be described as “grabbing ladies by the, ahem, you know. ” Literally, as Joe Biden might say.
Many of the names are still around, although they’ve been changed to be less, errr, graphic in the intervening years.
Nothing is as good as the town of [pronounced Foo-king] Austria. They’ve contemplated changing the name but only because “the damned English keep stealing our signs!”
Just who the hell is checking green cards around here?
After John Candy, Martin Short, and SCTV, it’s pretty obvious we let down our guard.
Awards are for conferring honor to the receivers and power to the givers.
For my part I want her show to fail from lack of viewership, not from being pulled due to pressure.
Awards should be pulled due to pressure though.
I don’t put much stock in awards in general, but in the end the awards reflect on those administering the awards more than those who are granted them. If they give their awards to those who are undeserving, then the award is worthless in itself.
If Barack Obama was worthy of a Nobel for his peace efforts three months in to his presidency, then that just shows the Nobel to be a meaningless political joke. They can bestow their self glorifying awards all they want, it means nothing to me. And it defines for me what the significance of all future Nobels are. Not much.
That doesn’t mean the Nobel winners aren’t worthy of praise, just that they aren’t worthy of praise based solely on their Nobel.
Charles Cooke and David French both have fine pieces at NRO on Bee. They illustrate, however, the problem with playing the “what about” game. The larger discussion of Bee–that she should be fired irrespective of what happened to anyone else–is being subsumed by niggling over whether what she did is as “serious” as what Barr did. The dodge then begins. Rather than just acknowledging she should be off the air, her defenders are able to split hairs over comparisons. Racism v obscenity, blah, blah, blah. Bee should simply be judged on her own lack of merit.
The Norwegian Parliament is clearly mad with all that power. Mad, I tell you!
Yabbut, on television merit is decided by the audience, so that’s not really an option.
I agree, though it’s not very likely to happen. She’s playing to her audience. Most of us who find the comments offensive weren’t watching her show in the first place.
That’s only because those signs are printed in Austrian according to our former President.
Well, I do live in a State which boast the towns of “Blue Ball,” “Bird in Hand,” and “Intercourse.”
But I don’t think, for consistency and merit, you can beat the Brits on this sort of thing. My sister sent me for Christmas, a couple of years ago, a map of silly and rude British place names. Many of them are mentioned on this site. You have been warned.
All near Paradise, as I remember! I was best man at a wedding in Paradise, long ago. We tried to get them two tickets to travel from Bird in Hand to Paradise to Intercourse to Blue Ball, but the bus line didn’t print the town names on the tickets.
We did dance to Eddie Money’s Two Tickets To Paradise, anyway!
She won’t in anyway that matters. It’s like the Emmy’s giving all those anti-Trump speeches. No one watches the Emmys anymore.
They are not the Emmy’s. They are the Enemies. Although sometimes I think of them as the Enemas.