Fresh from a break for "Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner" special last week, Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal" returned to TBS on Wednesday.
And, because breaking news affects those who make fun of it as much as those who cover it, her show had to scramble in the wake of President Donald Trump's surprise firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday night.
"Ooh, what a fun time to be alive!" she mock-enthused Wednesday night before a montage of shocked network reactions to Comey's dismissal. Her show was equally caught off guard. (The full segment, which includes coarse language, is available on YouTube.)
"At 6 p.m. with our show written and the staff on their second whiskey," she said in front of a shot of a sad writer's room, "our dumb democracy ran into a wall with a bucket on its head again."
In a segment partly dubbed "Our Weekly Constitutional Crisis," Bee went on to recount Comey's dramatic ouster, including the O.J.-evoking coverage of his SUV on a Los Angeles freeway, Sean Spicer (shown as a row of hedges) asking not to be recorded by the press and Richard Nixon's presidential library distancing itself from Trump as the affair unfolded.
The segment even made room for pundit Jeffrey Toobin, appearing on various networks and repeatedly declaring that this sort of thing is "not normal," a descriptor that Bee now finds inaccurate.
All in all, it was impressive work given the short lead time the show was forced into. And, fortunately, the Internet is a vast space where no material need go to waste. "Full Frontal" posted its original opening segment, which focused on the House of Representatives' passage of the American Health Care Act, on Facebook.
