Samantha Bee has never been one to shy away from uncomfortable topics, whether she was skewering politicians on her late night show “Full Frontal,” or diving headfirst into the absurdities of American life.
Now, she’s taking on a topic too many people pretend doesn’t exist: menopause.
With her new one-woman show “How To Survive Menopause,” (coming to the Wealthy Theatre Sept. 25) Bee turns hot flashes, mood swings, and midlife revelations into a sharp, hilarious, and surprisingly cathartic evening.
As she prepared to hit the road for her latest tour, she talked with Revue about finding humor in the hormonal apocalypse, the highs and lows of life after late night, and why comedy might be the last tool left to survive politics, aging, and the nightly news.
“When I entered that phase of life, I had a really hard time talking about it myself,” Bee said about why she wanted to do a show about menopause. “As a person who is very vocal about difficult stuff, I usually don’t shy away from hard topics. And even I felt so vulnerable any time I would bring up perimenopause, or menopause.”
Bee continued to talk about it for longer, and as time passed, she got more comfortable with the topic, sharing her experiences, and joking about it.
“It was such a long process for me to be able to freely talk about it,” she added. “And I thought that feels really important because if I, as a person who is very used to speaking publicly, am having trouble talking about this, then I cannot imagine what it might be like for someone who is not as used to jumping into the deep end of an unknown. So that’s what really what led me to do the show. It’s the only show I could really imagine performing right now. It just is such a natural, organic extension of where I am at right now.”
Bee first entered perimenopause while she was working on her hit TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.”
Formerly a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” Bee has broken down barriers her entire career. She was the only female correspondent for her first five years on “The Daily Show,” and the first non-American (she’s Canadian and now holds dual citizenship). She spent 12 years there, becoming the longest-serving regular correspondent, before launching “Full Frontal” in 2016, where she became the first woman to host a late night satire show.
So it isn’t surprising that when some of the symptoms of perimenopause started to occur, she first thought it was just stress from her fast-paced new job.
Soon she realized that her hair falling out in clumps and her agonizing frozen shoulder were something far more significant.
“Seven or eight years ago no one was talking about (menopause) at all then,” Bee said. “And I mean, like nobody. Zero people, only doctors and science. And so I had no information at all. I didn’t recognize anything that was happening to me. I thought that I was just really stressed out. And that’s why my hair was like falling out. But it was so confusing.”
Ultimately she went to her doctor, who explained that what she was experiencing was perimenopause, something she had not considered at first, because she thought she was too young.
“Once someone put a name to it, it just made it easier to deal with,” she said. “Like, OK, it’s not you. And it’s funny, when I reflect, I think, ‘Wow, can we really only have been talking about this out loud for, like, less than 10 years?’ A lot of people are like, it’s so trendy to talk about menopause right now. But, it’s not really a trend. It’s not. It doesn’t go away. You just get used to it, because now we talk about it.”
“How To Survive Menopause” isn’t just a stand-up show; it’s part group therapy, part rallying cry, and part reminder that laughter really is a survival skill.
Although the show is available as an audiobook now exclusively on Audible, Bee developed it as the starting point for a larger, ongoing conversation. So taking it out on tour really gives her a chance to evolve the show with the audience.
“During the course of the show, I’m asking people to tell me stuff about their bodies that I’ve never heard before,” Bee said.
One of the biggest surprises she’s seen from doing the show is just how diverse the audience is age-wise, with far more men in the crowd than she had initially anticipated.
“I have a 17-year-old son, and he definitely does not love it,” Bee said. “He’s definitely like, ‘Can you just go one day without saying that word to me?’ And I’m like, ‘I respect your wishes,’ but it’s going to feel really normal for him later in his life. Even when he obviously doesn’t want to talk about it with me now.”
Although the show is very personal, Bee admits that politics still play a huge part in the discussion, as recent federal budget cuts have come at the expense of further research into women’s health.
“Those DOGE boys were really searching for those keywords and canceling those research initiatives,” Bee said. “So I feel like we’re in a real holding pattern on research into women’s bodies for very evident reasons. I’m not really sure that Big Balls was all that interested in women’s health research. That was the first to go.”
As for looking back on working in late night, and the future of the format, Bee said she feels like television is at a contraction point.
“Look what happened to Stephen (Colbert),” she said about her longtime “Daily Show” friend who’s “Late Show” was recently, and controversially, canceled by CBS. “There’s certainly not a broad appetite at the network level in the entertainment industry to embrace political satire right now. People are on their phones all day. So they actually are very well aware of what’s happening in the world. And maybe there’s a role for TV to play. And I think there is an evolution. It’s very difficult to broadcast it in that way.
“I would say that I think that online people are doing a great job, like on TikTok and on YouTube,” she added. “People are doing really great out there, which is really admirable. It’s like, ‘how do you keep your energy going? How do you keep your energy moving forward when 10 different terrible things happen every single day?’ Since my show ended, I actually reflect on that. Sometimes I’m like, I don’t know what we would choose to talk about if we were just doing one story for a week, because we would have to accept three storylines per episode, and reject like a hundred equally important stories. It’s just a landfill of terrible stories to make a single episode. Not to get so dark, but it’s so dark! It’s crazy!”
Since the cancellation of “Full Frontal” in 2022, Bee said she’s cut down her daily media diet, but remains a news junkie. Nowadays she prefers things like yoga to distract her from the daily chaos, but she can never just bury her head in the sand. So in addition to touring with her show, she’s currently writing a new project, and busy getting her kids into college
The Pyramid Scheme Presents Samantha Bee: How To Survive Menopause
Wealthy Theatre, 1130 Wealthy St. SE, Grand Rapids
Sept. 25, 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $55.33 - $99.62
Samanthabee.com, Pyramidschemebar.com, grcmc.org/theatre/events
