Bee seems poised to play the role of Hillary Clinton’s inner insult comic. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

On the second episode of “Full Frontal,” TBS’s new late-night show, Samantha Bee, the host, took shots at the Presidential debates. At one point, she flashed a Photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton at the lectern, her forearms scribbled with crib notes. The left arm read, “Don’t be c*nty”; the right, “shrill = bad.” “Oh, my God, what a coincidence,” Bee cooed. “TBS just gave me that very same note.”

Even as television brims with funny women—from the stoners of “Broad City” to the comedy POTUS Julia Louis-Dreyfus—late night has remained a men’s club. God, that is a boring sentence to write each year. In 2015, Vanity Fair did a photo shoot celebrating the new landscape of late-night shows, after Letterman and Leno, Jon Stewart and Craig Ferguson stepped down. The spread showed ten men in expensive suits, sipping cocktails, like Johnny Carson cosplayers: from Stephen Colbert to Bill Maher.

Two of the men—Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah—were black, a key improvement. Still, the semiotics were hard to miss: meet the new host, same as the old host. When the issue hit newsstands, Bee, a longtime correspondent on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” and her husband, Jason Jones, another former “Daily Show” contributor, were preparing to début “Full Frontal.” Bee’s tweeted response launched her brand: she’d put herself into the picture. But in her self-portrait she had a naked, muscled male torso, because her head was atop a centaur, with laser beams shooting from her eyes. The message was, basically, Screw a tuxedo. A secondary theme: I’d rather be powerful than polite.

Bee’s show has followed through on that promise, with impeccable timing, midway through an election that threatens to devolve into an apocalyptic match between a bright-orange Bobby Riggs and a hawkish Billie Jean King. This is both a surprise and a relief, because I’d found myself apprehensive about “Full Frontal,” whose ads in the subway joked, “Watch or You’re Sexist”—a jujitsu joke with a glint of anxiety. Sisterhood is powerful, as the good book says, but it’s no way to judge comedy. And on “The Daily Show” Bee had been good but not great; her segments as the show’s “Senior Women’s Correspondent” could be cruel, the result of interviewing ordinary people with the aim of making them look like idiots. As a host, however, she’s evolved into a sharp-eyed avenger whose caustic streak is wholly justified by her targets.

On the surface, there’s plenty that’s familiar about “Full Frontal.” Bee delivers monologues interspersed with visual gags thrown on the screen behind her, like a shot of Ted Cruz in a Harry Potter sorting hat. (“Slytherin!” Bee shrieked, in horror.) There are taped segments, often featuring group interviews: Bee talking to Sanders voters or to Syrian refugees. Like John Oliver’s excellent “Last Week Tonight,” on HBO, “Full Frontal” airs weekly, which reduces filler. And, like Oliver, she doesn’t do celebrity interviews, which eliminates promotional fluff.

What does feel new is Bee’s slash-and-burn, slightly gonzo approach to political satire. Although Bee, unlike Billy Eichner, does not literally scream, her show, in its first three months, has been fuelled by a chipper, smiling, but barely repressed fury. Eyes flashing, she speaks at a motormouth clip—and the fact that she looks like a suburban mom in a yogurt ad only heightens the effect. Her persona might in fact be “c*nty” if the jokes weren’t there. But they are, like arrows in a centaur’s quiver.

In a typical segment, Bee took a torch to the problem of untested rape kits, describing the crisis in Texas as an episode of “Hoarders: Rape Kit Edition.” Her explanation: Texas was overdoing it with the Marie Kondo method of reducing clutter. “Does this rape kit spark joy?” she purred, holding a kit to her face, then tossing it into the trash. The gag deepened when she addressed Renee Unterman, a Georgia Republican who blocked legislation to resolve the crisis. Bee held up a different object: a book listing rules for comedy. It read, “1. No rape jokes. 2. There’s a special place in hell”—a reference to that quote from Madeleine Albright, about women who don’t support other women. “Thank you for your service,” Bee told the comedy rulebook, then chucked it in the trash. And she tore into Unterman, yelling, “Are you in the pocket of Big Rape?”

In Bee’s welcome approach, “women’s issues” are presented as inseparable from “real” politics, but it’s her resistance to making nice that lends the show its jagged energy. An otherwise wonky history of superdelegates featured this throwaway jab: “Ted Kennedy waged a brutal primary challenge that left Carter as weak and defenseless as a woman left to drown in an Oldsmobile.” Mitt Romney got “beat like a Muslim girl at a Trump rally.” In one segment, Bee responded to the barely concealed kink of a Trump manifesto about how big he was planning to win by moaning, blindfolded, “Win me harder. Win all over me. Just try not to win in my hair.”

In her taped segments, Bee is alternately lacerating and open-minded, as called for. “Have you thought about regulating the safety of back alleys?” she asked one anti-abortion congressman. “Because that’s where a lot of women will be having their abortions now.” When he asked where she got her numbers, Bee deadpanned, “Reality.” (And then she showed the stats.) Yet with some Trump supporters she seemed legitimately curious to understand their views, especially those of a likable young black man who explained that Trump’s attitudes toward race were, at most, “a minor negative.”

Bee isn’t as reflexively raunchy as Amy Schumer, but she does go blue more often than her late-night peers. In one of the show’s more pungent zingers, John Kasich was described as “the neglected taint between the Republican Party’s dick”—Bee flashed a photo of Cruz onscreen—“and asshole”: a shot of Trump. You might find that joke crass, but it’s well crafted. And there’s something frankly cathartic about watching Bee simply call a prick a prick during a Republican primary that has been a parade of genital humor: all those “Schlong Hillary 2016” T-shirts and the bleeding-from-her-wherever jokes. The Republican front-runner is running as standup-in-chief this year, convulsing stadiums with his borscht-belt timing; meanwhile, Hillary gets dinged as humorless—and, when she does make jokes, unfunny. Watching this dynamic can make one feel caught in an ancient comedy trap, a clash between naughty male ids and female censors, Groucho and Margaret Dumont, in which the only choice is to laugh or to be a prude.

But, as Audre Lorde would almost certainly not put it, the master’s dick jokes can sometimes work just fine to dismantle his house. Shock humor isn’t Bee’s only mode, but, like Trump, she’s a whiz at vicious nicknames: Ted Cruz is “the Junior Senator from the Uncanny Valley.” Sarah Palin is “the arctic maenad who couldn’t name a magazine.” Trump is “Casino Mussolini.”

If Obama needed Key and Peele to be his anger translator, Bee seems poised to play the role of Hillary’s inner insult comic. There’s nothing new about politicians gravitating to certain styles of comedy. Trump is a Howard Stern man. It made sense when Obama made visits to Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. And for several years there have been glimpses of proto-Hillarys in the TV-comedy complex, from Leslie Knope, in “Parks and Recreation,” to Kate McKinnon’s Clinton imitation on “Saturday Night Live.” But with no women on late night, who better to cover Hillary Clinton than a blond, middle-aged, highly experienced white woman who was lapped for a prestigious job by a comparatively untested, more chill, younger, biracial, male competitor? (Yes, that’s a cheap shot—Bee left before Stewart stepped down and Noah stepped up—but so it goes.) On an early episode, Bee marvelled at the perfect material she had to work with: “A barely contained cluster of frustration. A human Upworthy post. The world’s only unlikable Canadian. A puppet who finally became a real boy. And, of course, a tangerine-tinted trash-can fire.” If Bee, too, is a barely contained cluster of frustration, maybe it’s what shoves the door open at last. That’s one advantage to having a chip on your shoulder. It builds upper-body strength. ♦