I Know I Am, But What Are You?

Starred review from June 28, 2010
Daily Show senior correspondent Samantha Bee offers colorful (and off-color) anecdotes from a childhood lived (at various points) with her bohemian mother, orderly father and stepmother, and devout Catholic grandmother. She also describes misadventures during vacation; a short-lived career in children's entertainment; her dislike of her tiny, rapidly aging hands; as well as the inexplicably numerous encounters she's had with strange men who expose themselves. Both the text and the dry, matter-of-fact narration are consistently sympathetic and engaging, and Bee's imitation of her 13-year-old self—ending every sentence with that typical rising inflection—is absolutely hilarious. A Gallery hardcover.

March 15, 2010
A hit-and-miss debut collection of humorous essays from Daily Show correspondent Bee.

The best pieces here are very funny, and the author's skewed, satirical perspective, honed on the show, is evident throughout most of the book. Particularly memorable essays cover the Canadian writer's pubescent crush on Jesus ("I didn't need to be a bride of Christ. I was comfortable just dating Him, and if things got a little more serious, then that was cool, too…I had a notebook dedicated to ironing out the details of my postmarital name change. Samantha Christ. Mrs. Jesus Christ, Lamb of God"); her propensity for attracting pedophiles trying to ply her with free pizza, and with strange men exposing themselves to her ("A penis is a fair-weather friend at best, but for some reason it's always sunny in Bee-town. And I don't mean that as a compliment"); her courtship with her husband Jason Jones, also a Daily Show correspondent; and the couple's misadventures in children's theater ("Children's entertainment was a natural fit for me because (a) I dislike other people's children, and (b) I was unemployable in virtually every other aspect of show business"). Bee is at her best in"May December Never Come," about the yuckiness of dating across generations and having your boyfriend mistaken for your father, or vice versa ("the only way to describe how this makes me feel is to say that it makes my vagina nauseous, if that's even physically possible"). Lesser pieces meander, making it hard to find the point, while others are too scattered. Her conversational phrasing suggests an engaging monologist, but as a writer she would benefit from a stronger edit.

The book will certainly please longtime fans, whether or not it attracts new ones.

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