For a few blessed moments on Monday night, the stars of Samantha Bee and Michelle Obama fell into alignment. Less than two hours before Obama applauded Hillary Clinton for sticking it out in public service while haters mocked her looks and laugh, Bee took her own television network to task for comparing the Democratic presidential nominee with a yelping hyena.
On Sunday, TBS had tweeted a video likening Clinton to a maniacal scavenger of the savanna, the likes of which mainly pop up in the dregs of blog comments or alt-right LiveJournal entries. “Move over Donkey! There’s a new mascot in town. … #ImWithHyena,” read the tweet. The 24-second video, titled “Hillary Clinton’s Call of the Wild,” interspersed video of Clinton laughing with clips of cackling hyenas. The Twitter account for Bee’s excellent late-night show Full Frontal, which airs on TBS, retweeted the network a day later with a bit of commentary du jour recently wielded by Clinton against Donald Trump: “Delete your account.”
The video was originally posted by the Heckler, a cheesy TBS-run site for slapstick parody videos and joke posts. Sexist tweets are a part of its shtick:
It appears that the Clinton video has since been taken down; a link that once led to the clip now returns a 404 error that says “Sorry, bruh.” According to the Hollywood Reporter, which published a screenshot, Full Frontal deleted its tweet soon after posting it, too.
TBS apologized in a statement released Tuesday morning: “This post was obviously a poor attempt at humor and has been taken down. Moving forward we’ll leave political satire to professionals like Samantha Bee.”
It’s not evident whether Bee’s clapback was a sanctioned tweet immediately regretted or whether it was accidentally posted by a social media manager trying to tweet from her or his own account. Either way, Bee or her employee’s instinct to put distance between the show and its network over a sexist meme is the right one. When compared with the Daily Show’s recent twofer Twitter mess-up after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Texas abortion restrictions, Full Frontal’s “delete your account” makes the argument for more women-led comedy shows even clearer.
