What it's Like to Attend a Live Taping of Full Frontal With Samantha Bee
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee:
This past Wednesday I saw a live taping of "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee" at CBS. The building was right next to "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver", on West 57th Street.
For whatever reason, the rules at this taping were more strict than they were at other tapings I have been to. Samantha Bee's show is on TBS, so I'm guessing that the strict security had to do with TBS’s approach to security. When I gave them by bag to be inspected, they told me that I also had to take off my belt and give it to them for inspection before entering the metal detector.
The audience of Full Frontal seemed to be mainly comprised of one specific subculture. I noticed that a significant number of audience members presented themselves in conventionally androgynous or gender-ambiguous ways. I found myself sitting across from two people who appeared to be a queer couple while waiting to enter the studio. Two other distinctive features I noticed about the Full Frontal audience were that it was collectively a younger audience, and that there appeared to be slightly more women than men in attendance.
As I pondered the differences between my two experiences, I wondered if one of the reasons for the tighter security at the Full Frontal taping had to do with politics. Samantha Bee's show is not afraid of specifically coming of as a show for liberals, by liberals. The comedian who performed before Samantha Bee came out spoke about gun control and free healthcare, asking the audience to cheer for these things. This type of comedy advocates for specific political perspectives.
The fact that the audience seemed to be a female-dominated one at the Full Frontal taping makes a lot of sense to me, because Samantha Bee is making history as a female political satirist on late-night TV. Upon attending the show, I learned that not only is the host female, but that the entire show is run almost exclusively by women. The pre-show comedian was female, as well as most of the producers and writers that Samantha Bee introduced to the audience as she gave them credit for working on the episode that we were witnessing the taping of.
I don't know exactly why there seemed to be greater numbers of queer couples and apparently gender-nonconforming people at the taping of Samantha Bee's show. If I were to make an educated guess about that, I would guess that many LGBTQ+ people might feel more welcomed and celebrated at such an obviously feminist show, given the intersectionality at play when examining the respective trajectories of the feminist movement and the LGBTQ+ liberation movement.
