Samantha Bee is recounting how she landed her first major job in TV on the seminal US late-night news parody, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “They were having trouble finding a woman who they thought was funny,” she says – and she’s being deadly serious.

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This was 2003, and Bee, then 34 years old, was part of a female sketch comedy troupe in her native Toronto. Their audiences sometimes barely reached double figures. “I was at the point of giving it all up; I was done with being impoverished,” she recalls. Then producers from The Daily Show arrived in the city to scope the Canadian comedy scene. “Even as I was auditioning for them, I thought it was ridiculous,” Bee admits. “Really? In all of America, you can’t find a woman that you think is funny? You have come to another country to find one?”

Fast-forward 15 years and, far from having given it all up, the 48-year-old comedian is at the helm of her very own giant-slaying late-night show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. Since its launch in February 2016, her weekly show, with its excoriating, unfiltered, firmly feminist take on politics and current affairs – like Joan Rivers crossed with Armando Iannucci – has won an Emmy and earned multiple further nominations. Last spring, Bee was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daily (fe)male... Bee, to the right of Steve Carell. Photograph: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central

No demographic is safe from the biting wit of Bee, who is as quick to call out hypocrisy from white, liberal America (for example on voter turnout, she asked: “How many times do we expect black people to build our country for us?”) as she is to eviscerate cornerstones of the right, such as Fox News (“A nightmare factory powered by white resentment and relentless misinformation ... making family Thanksgivings unbearable for 20 years.”) During the presidential election, she gave Hillary Clinton anything but an easy ride, too, calling her “a barely contained cluster of frustration”, and likening Bernie Sanders to Doc Brown from Back to the Future: “the elderly lunatic whose well-intentioned meddling screws things up for everyone”.

Despite being the face of political satire in the age of identity politics, Bee is not wholly comfortable with my labelling the show “liberal”. “I guess that’s how people would characterise it,” she says, in her office in midtown Manhattan, after some hemming and hawing. “But on a personal note, I’m a much more complicated human being than just a liberal or a conservative.”

The show does have a necessarily strong point of view, though: hers. “You can’t make a show like this by committee,” she reasons. “I care a lot about people who are committed fans of the show, but I don’t really make the show for other people.” Off-air, Bee is more composed and contained than her potty-mouthed, sarcastic on-screen persona, who machine-guns creative, colourful insults that would make Malcolm Tucker proud, in passionate, impressively slick seven-minute monologues. It is hard to imagine the thoughtful and considered woman sitting behind her large, busy desk today calling Rupert Murdoch a “sentient liver spot”.

“That’s the loudest, most unfiltered version of me that exists,” she says. “In my private life, I’m not like that at all. I don’t kick doors in and walk into meetings wowing everybody with my Entertainment Personality. It’s a wonderful 21-minute catharsis, once a week, but I don’t need to be that person in my day-to-day life.” Her 65-strong team of writers, producers, technicians and graphic designers is notable for its diversity: half of the staff are female and a third are non-white. “It’s not like we have solved the world’s diversity problem, but we do think about it all the time,” she says. “When we need to hire people, we think: let’s try to find a woman for this.”

Bee has stormed her way into what had been a televisual late-night gentlemen’s club (“Why there aren’t more female comedians? Maybe it’s because every time a woman opens her mouth to tell a joke, someone tries to put their dick in it,” she once suggested), outgunning the likes of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and James Corden, in both the ratings and her relentless condemnation of Trump (“The Fyre festival of presidents”; “The thrice-married, foul-mouthed tit judge ... who thinks Corinthians is a type of car upholstery”; “A crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf”).

“I imagine a fan might call it joyful rage,” says executive producer Miles Kahn, when asked to characterise the show’s savage tone. “Whereas someone who is not a fan of the show would just call it ‘Shrill lady yelling at me’. We don’t have to steep ourselves in fake irony. That’s a great way to do satire, too, but we just call out the thing that we want to say in a way that is funny and cathartic.”

It’s insanely fast. We have whiplash every single day, and we definitely all have stomach cancer. We’re one big ulcer Samantha Bee

The nature of the news cycle over the past 12 months must also present a punishing challenge. A week has never felt such a long time in politics. “It’s insanely fast. We have whiplash every single day, and we definitely all have stomach cancer,” she says, reaching for the oversized bottle of antacid tablets beside her computer and giving it a rattle. “We’re all just one big peptic ulcer.”

Despite the pressures of the job, Bee is making efforts to occasionally disconnect. “I do have to know what’s happening, it’s my job,” she shrugs. “But my children [she has three, all under 12, with her husband, fellow writer and producer Jason Jones] are always telling me to get off my phone.”

Even more helpfully, on the night of the presidential election, she resigned from participating in social media. She has not checked Facebook since, and she switched off her notifications on Twitter, a deliberate move to dodge the trolls. “It has made the most profound difference,” she says, earnestly. “The amount of hatred and anger just wore me down.”

Bee’s smart, savvy brand of humour would likely have flourished in any political climate, but Full Frontal is manna for many in an unprecedented moment of freshly revealed misogyny. “I’m leaning so hard into feminism that I’ve gone full witch,” she says. One of the most prominent topics over the past few months has, of course, been the dramatic downfall of countless prominent men in positions of power. “Some woman could just do a show exclusively and only about that, four nights a week, and that would be just fine,” Bee observes. When she does riff on the topic in the show, she says: “If you don’t want to tune into your partner’s feelings throughout sex maybe you shouldn’t be fucking a person at all. May I suggest a coin purse or a Ziploc bag full of grape jelly?”

She also agrees that, horrific though the nature and extent of the allegations are, a fire has been lit under many women (and men) too. “I definitely feel an excitement in the air, I feel this drumbeat that is unique,” she nods. “I would not have predicted what happened in the presidential election; I would not have predicted the turnout at the Women’s March. And I do feel that in the midst of all of this garbage, a phoenix is rising from these ashes.

“I think there are so many stories left to be told,” she says. “This is just the tip of the flag on top of the iceberg. This is so far from being over.”

Episodes of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee are online at samanthabee.com