| There’s a dour-faced, arched-eyebrow interview style employed by such television news vets as Jane Pauley and Diane Sawyer that Toronto native Samantha Bee has got down perfectly. Bee turns a rigid interview stance into a powerful comedic weapon in the field reports she does for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Lobbing bizarre, mocking questions at such real-life oddballs as an entrepreneur who runs a website that lets wheelchair-bound paraplegics shoot real firearms at real animals, she remains unflinching in her poised demeanour.
"The one thing I can do that makes me appropriate for this job is that I am able to keep a straight face under almost any circumstances," explains Bee. "I think that’s the only skill set I bring to this equation."
Of course, fans of The Daily Show, broadcast in Canada on CTV and the Comedy Network, know she brings a lot more than just that. In less than two years on the hit American news satire, she has established herself as one of the show’s funniest and most intuitive correspondents. Her segments in the field or in studio are routinely some of the show’s brightest bits. Not bad for a performer who attended the Daily Show auditions in Toronto with low expectations. Even when she got the call to audition again, this time alongside the show’s front man and current Entertainment Weekly Entertainer of the Year, she remained guarded in her expectations.
"I tried to be very positive about it," Bee recalls, "I tried to see it as an opportunity, even if I didn’t get the job. It’s not every day people fly you to New York for auditions." Once she had learned, to her great surprise, that she had landed the gig, she admits, "I was vibrating with excitement. I didn’t know what to do with myself for weeks."
Prior to joining The Daily Show, Bee was a member of the Toronto-based all-female sketch troupe Atomic Fireballs, and got work here and there in TV commercials. As her notoriety has grown, so has the attention lavished upon her by her native land.
"I presented an award at the Geminis (last December)," she says. "It was totally surreal. It was only a few years ago that I couldn't get hired to save my life. I was totally unknown in the television and film industry in Canada."
A big part of the charm of Bee’s Daily Show segments is in the eccentric folk they feature. In one piece, she spotlighted a guy who chose to protest his town’s refusal to fix a broken sewer pipe in his front yard by taking a dump in a city-hall bathroom close to the mayor’s office everyday. At one point in the segment, the man sat in the stall doing his business while Bee sat outside on the floor rocking back and forth, leading him in a chorus of "We Will Overcome."
"It’s great when you have people who will speak passionately and honestly about what they are doing," Bee says. "There are some people who believe that these are not real stories with real people, but they actually are. We put our fake spin on it, but these are real individuals who believe in something."
And when that something is as bizarre as crapping to make a political statement, Bee will be there, eyebrow arched, nodding in agreement to anything your average wack job has to say. |
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