It has been one insane year of change for Comedy Central and The Daily Show team. Beyond the horrible, lurking feeling that loyal viewers are going to lose Jon Stewart at the end of this summer (and whose replacement is not without his issues), the show has been dealing with the loss of major and minor contributors including Jason Jones, Larry Wilmore, and John Hodgman.
Last night, the greatest fucking news team took their biggest hit so far when they had to bid farewell to Samantha Bee. Not only was she the longest cast member on the show—with twelve years and three presidential elections under her belt—Bee was the strong and hilarious voice for gender inequality and women’s rights. She was always game to dive right into an insane piece, and her brash and bold sense of humor was the perfect foil to the rest of the “news” team.
Stewart dedicated the entire B-block of last night’s episode to Bee’s legacy and departure, which ended in tears for both the host and correspondent in tears. Read his touching introduction to the inspired montage below.
We’ve been down this road a few times this year, each time it’s not easy. Tonight marks the end of an era, the final show of the longest serving member of the greatest fucking news team, Samantha Bee. It all started back in two-thousand aught three: the Bush presidency was entering its terrible twos, the Iraq war was just starting, so we needed a correspondent. So we looked in all your usual places—your liquor stores, your betting parlors, your methadone clinics—and, obviously, Google Maps was in its nascent stages, we took a wrong turn, we ended up in Canada, and we found this just delightful, incredibly funny person, Sam Bee. So we hid her in a trunk and raced back over the border, pursued by Mounties. Canada had no idea what it was losing.
Bee will be taking her immense talents, along with Jones, to TBS as part of a two-show deal. We will follow her to the ends of the earth.
