Samantha Bee Didn’t Care for 'SNL' Boss Lorne Michaels’ Dig at Her

Samantha Bee did not care for Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels’ unflattering remarks about her in the new biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, but she didn’t disagree with him, either.

In the book, which comes out on Tuesday, Michaels reportedly describes Bee as “one-sided and strident,” citing her as an example of what he tries to avoid with SNL’s political tone. Bee — God, I miss Samantha Bee right now — addressed the comments on The Daily Beast Podcast with co-host Joanna Coles, which I should listen to more often if I miss Samantha Bee as much as I say I do.

“I mean, literally — imagine calling anyone strident when you have built a career out of elevating the loudest guy in the room,” Bee jokes, poking at Michaels’ long history of championing aggressively outspoken male comedians.

Michaels, for his part, claims that SNL is nonpartisan, telling biographer Susan Morrison, “It’s the hardest thing for me to explain to this generation that the show is nonpartisan … We have our biases, we have our people we like better than others, but you can’t be Samantha Bee.” That comment was reportedly made just two weeks before Donald Trump’s 2016 election win. It was that same attitude that, at the time, elicited this critique of Lorne Michaels by then SNLer Tim Robinson: “Lorne has lost his f**king mind and someone needs to shoot him in the back of the head.”

Bee was more diplomatic. “I concede the point,” she said on the podcast. “He’s right. I am one-sided. And I am strident, and proudly so.” Goddamn right.

Still, Bee has nothing but love for the institution of SNL. “It was such a delicious treat to sneak down to the basement and watch SNL as a young kid,” she recalled. “It felt like an illicit pleasure.” That said, it still sucked to be called out by Michaels. “It’s never exciting to be referenced in a negative way in someone else’s biography that’s gonna do really well.”

Fine, fine: The Daily Beast podcast featuring Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles has been added to my subs, despite my distaste for The Daily Beast. Meanwhile, the SNL 50th Anniversary special will air on Sunday night, which means that we can stop talking about the 50th Anniversary special and return to our weekly relationship with SNL.