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I Know I Am, But What Are You? [Hardcover]

Samantha Bee
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)


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Hardcover, June 1, 2010 --  
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Book Description

June 1, 2010
Senior correspondent Samantha Bee joins the growing list of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart contributors-turned-authors in this hilarious collection of essays.

As the Most Senior Correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee has demonstrated an ability to coax people into caricaturing themselves—most famously in segments like “Kill Drill,” featuring hunters and fossil fuel executives claiming to be environmentalists, and “Tropical Repression,” featuring a Florida politician running his campaign on opposition to gay rights. Here, in This Might Sting a Little, Samantha turns the spotlight toward her own life.

From suffering through her parents’ humiliating sex talk (that even included lesbian sex after a family vacation spent watching women’s tennis) to her Wiccan mother’s attempt to dissuade her from Catholicism at an early age, Samantha takes listeners on a very funny ride. She also shares interesting and bizarre careers from her past—including a brief stint at a frame store and a job working as Japanese anime character Sailor Moon in a live show that toured in Canada.

With laugh-out-loud anecdotes featuring the same smart, biting wit that has made audiobooks by Sarah Vowell and Chelsea Handler such successes, This Might Sting a Little is filled with stories that have critics calling Samantha Bee “sweet, adorable, and vicious.”

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A senior correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Toronto-born comedian pokes fun at herself in a witty collection of personal essays. Recalling her upbringing, she lightheartedly and hysterically skewers her parents, stepparents, grandparents, and even the nuns who taught her math, half of whom "looked and smelled like the rejection of life itself." Bee's stepmother took camping "very seriously," and preparing for a trip was "like preparing for the End of Days;" her father, claiming to be thinking up strategies for better fuel efficiency, was really "just reading Penthouse on the toilet." Regarding the nuns at her Catholic school, Bee doesn't hold back: "You could see that they had all their lady parts, but you just knew that once a month they menstruated dust." Bee takes readers from childhood to adolescence and beyond, reminiscing along the way about her first boyfriend, comparing their sexual chemistry to that of a "sea cucumber that sits motionless on the cold, dark ocean floor and dreams of dry-humping a nearby scallop." Bee successfully brings her witty, self-deprecating, slightly cynical, and semi-scathing world view from screen to page.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Full of humor and spunk, this is a delightful installment in the misadventures of McQueen's charmingly farcical character.” — Booklist --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Gallery Books; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1439142734
  • ISBN-13: 978-1439142738
  • Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #757,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Any time a comedian writes about their life there's a "through the looking glass" tendency to question how much of it is truth and how much is played strictly for comic effect. As a regular contributor to "The Daily Show" Samantha Bee has shown herself to be one of the sharpest wits on television and a master at deftly skewering an array of idiots, gasbags, blowhards, and freaks. What will shock and surprise readers the most is not only Bee's sharp sense of humor and wit, but her laying bare her past in shocking details. "I Know I Am" is by turns not only hilariously funny yet also thought provoking as you read all the drama that Bee has gone through in her life. Like any good comic Bee finds the humor and laughs in her past and plays it to comic effect. Ostensibly a series of essays on various aspects of her life, "I Know I Am" holds together well as a biography of sorts and also as musings on the absurdities of a misspent life doing an array of crazy things. That she wound up on "The Daily Show" is nothing short of surprising, given the strange things she's done in her life, all told in a voice that is distinctively hers. If you've enjoyed Samantha Bee on "The Daily Show" and want to know more about what makes her tick then you'll definitely enjoy "I Know I Am"! But there remains an otherworldly strangeness to the book that makes you wonder if its all true or invented; such is the nature of Bee's humor.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Rare funny book by a funny person June 20, 2010
Format:Hardcover
The key to Samantha Bee's humor is in her contradictions - she plays a repressed person who is outrageous. And unlike many comics whose work is hilarious on TV, she can actually write funny stories that are worth reading. This memoir of exaggerated tales of her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood probes the frustrations, hurts and stupidities of growing up human on planet Earth. Her strongest material is the least self-conscious. Bee's portrayal of herself as an ugly, awkward, indoorsy bookworm and TV watcher is both affecting, worrying and probably close to the truth. Her adolescent years, in which she made dangerous visits to older men, are scary and true-sounding, echoing the way that naďve youngsters find their way in the tricky and perilous word of the sexually savvy. Bee hit a few sour notes in her diatribe against May-December relationships. Her comments about the problems of older people crossed from wickedly insightful to needlessly mean. She redeemed herself with tales of her hunky college roommate, simultaneously irresistible physically and repulsive mentally.

"I Know I am" is a quick read -- I devoured it over a weekend, which is superfast for me. While Bee doesn't have the depth, insight and subtlety of a David Sedaris, the book was a fun read. It didn't achieve Sedaris's laugh-out-loud funniness, or oh-my-god appallingness. But it was a nice autobiography of tarted up truths about growing up in the Western world.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes amusing, frequently painful January 5, 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
"I Know I Am, But What Are You?" is an intermittently comic, hopefully exaggerated memoir of Sam Bee's childhood and young adulthood. The blurb on the back cover promises "candid, outspoken, laugh-out-loud funny essays," and while they are certainly candid and outspoken, I never laughed out loud. In fact, I found the in-your-face sexuality and crudeness in many of the essays rather icky and sad. The overall effect was the one you might have when an acquaintance decides to overshare: too much information, thank you!

You might need a stronger stomach or a different sense of humor than I have to really enjoy this book. I could see the absurdity in Bee's recollections (her crush on Jesus, for instance, or her work at what she calls a "penis clinic"), but her graphic descriptions of strangers' genitals and her pets' sexual aggressiveness and her much older lover's poop problems all grossed me out, and the story of how a friend's stripper boyfriend "entertained" her was squirm-inducing.

Especially grim are her memories of the desperately poor parenting she received from her mother. The woman attempted to enlighten her daughter by giving her sex manuals and showing her porn and letting her gay friends regale her with tales of fisting, autoerotic asphyxiation, and other things one should not share with an eight-year-old. This goes a long way toward explaining how neurotic and caustic Bee became as she grew up and why she found refuge and healing in comedy.

If you enjoy Bee's work on the Daily Show and would like to learn more about her personal background, this book will fill you in. Indeed, it may well tell you more than you'd like to know. She was a victim of emotional abuse by people who exposed her to vulgarity of the worst kind, left her to her own devices most of the time, and gave her endless opportunities for weirdness, misadventure, and overdoses of pop culture.

Congratulations, Sam. You survived your youth, prospered as an adult, and extracted comedy from catastrophe. But reading about it was often an uncomfortable experience.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars This is one funny book
I have had this book for awhile and I just never got around to reading it. That is, until I got called for jury duty! Read more
Published 3 months ago by Teacher Jeanne
3.0 out of 5 stars I would rather hear Ms. Bee than read her.
I enjoy reading memoirs. Learning of how others "live life" is part of my "DNA," at least professionally (that and I am just nosey) and reading this genre is an invitation for me... Read more
Published 3 months ago by YoyoMitch
5.0 out of 5 stars I Laughed So Hard I Almost Choked
I can trust some writers, most notably David Sedaris, to make me laugh out loud. In this book, Samantha Bee was responsible for making me laugh so hard that I lost my breath and... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Bee
5.0 out of 5 stars Laugh Out Loud Book with heart
Fantastic book. Ms. Bee's wit is as sharp as ever, and her storytelling is both hysterical and kind. A great book for anyone, but as a young woman, I found her relatable and fun.
Published 6 months ago by Ivy
4.0 out of 5 stars Horriblarious
At the same time painful and engrossing, Sam B paints a traumatic childhood of (for?) herself that will have you tampering your laughs with winces. Read more
Published 8 months ago by buenhombre
4.0 out of 5 stars I love Sam Bee, but why no pictures??
Can we just all agree that celebrity memoirs MUST include photos? No exceptions! Yes, I know that some celebrities write funny books that aren't strictly memoirs but rather books... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Mary Lavers
4.0 out of 5 stars Almost like a superhero origin, sort of, but not
Samantha Bee is known by fans of the Daily Show for her twisted sense of humor, and the origins of that twisted sense of humor are revealed here. Read more
Published 10 months ago by happydogpotatohead
4.0 out of 5 stars The Bee Girl
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I have read a lot of biographies lately, but this one stands out. The experiences that Samantha had as a child are very unique. Read more
Published 10 months ago by S. Blawn
5.0 out of 5 stars Sent this book to a friend in Florida
It arrived in a timely manner and she was thrilled with it.
Wish I had ordered it earlier so I could read it too, but that would have been the smart thing to do...
Published 13 months ago by JustGram
5.0 out of 5 stars ROTFLMAO
I wish I could come up with a review that is funny and interesting enough to capture how I feel about this book. But I can't. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Suzanne Persaud
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