Samantha Bee Confronts An Anti-Abortion Texas Lawmaker Who Has Zero Idea How Abortion Works
"You don't seem to know anything specifically about abortion, really. At all."
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is the newest addition to the comedy/current affairs genre, and it’s already punching above its weight, airing brutally honest, well-researched and ambitious segments on the Republican primaries, the Syrian refugee crisis and sexual harassment in the workplace.
Some of Full Frontal‘s best moments have come when Bee, a former Daily Show roving correspondent, gets out of the studio and goes to where the story is. Rather than just delivering a studio monologue on Texas’ restrictive anti-abortion laws, which have forced the closure of half the abortion clinics in the state, Bee went straight to one of the laws’ architects: Texas Republican Dan Flynn, a member of the state House of Reps and a 73-year-old man with only the vaguest idea of how abortions actually happen.
What followed was a lesson in how to give your opponent enough rope to hang themselves. One of the weaknesses of the approach taken by shows like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is how they don’t give their targets a platform; not only is it reasonable to give someone a right of reply when attacking them, but they can often offer a more effective indictment of their actions than any cutting one-liner in a comedian’s arsenal.
So it proved in this interview. Showing us a clueless old man miserably trying to justify why his grubby fingerprints are all over women’s uteruses is a lot more effective than just telling us about it.