
Samantha Bee, HOW TO SURVIVE MENOPAUSE
Emmy-winning comedian Samantha Bee chats with Zibby about her hilarious self-penned one-woman show and Audible original, HOW TO SURVIVE MENOPAUSE. The two talk all things menopause, aging, and the daily indignities that accompany both. They bond over frozen shoulders, impossible bras, night sweats, and the absurd lack of public conversation and research around women’s health in midlife—and applaud the Gen X women who are finally breaking the silence. Samantha also reflects on her unexpected path to comedy and television.
Transcript:
Zibby: Hi, Sam. Welcome. Thanks so much for coming on Totally Booked. I'm so excited to talk to you about menopause and everything else.
Samantha: Thank you. I'm so excited to talk to you too.
Oh my gosh. I love the flower on your jacket. I know.
Zibby: Thank you.
Samantha: No, people can see it. It's so pretty.
Zibby: Thank you.
Samantha: Very pretty.
Zibby: Wasn't sure if this was too, grandma ish or if it was cool.
Samantha: No.
Zibby: I, it's just went, I just went with it.
Samantha: I determined that it was cool. I said, so therefore,..
Zibby: It's, therefore it's, thank you.
Yes. The ultimate authority on anything. I will defer to you for all future outfits. I loved listening to your live show.
Samantha: Thank you.
Zibby: It was so cool that you released it even as an audible original so genius to do that so that everybody who wasn't there could feel like they were a part of the audience and all of that, and just get to feel like they could listen instead of having to sit and watch a show and all of that. So..
Samantha: Yeah, I like that, but I think it's because I am such a listener. Like I always, I don't always have something in my ear, but I really, I do love to listen to people talk and I like to listen to comedy shows in that format. And I listen to audio books and I really, I just, I love that experience.
I've always been a radio kid. I love that.
Zibby: And of course now you can just listen to my podcast all the time. So.
Samantha: A hundred percent right? Yeah, of course. Yes, exactly.
Zibby: Just put it on the rotation.
Samantha: Exactly.
Zibby: I'm kidding. I can't even pick which, like many of the jokes I related to the most, because I related to basically all of them.
Samantha: Thank you.
Zibby: But I, the shoulder one is, the frozen shoulder is the one that got me the most. 'cause I literally, with my son the other day, I was like, look at this. I can't raise my hand. That's my shoulder. And he's I dunno.
Samantha: What you have frozen shoulder right now.
Zibby: I went to the doctor and they gave me like an injection or whatever,
Samantha: okay that..
Zibby: I'm much better. But you had that too.
Samantha: I had that in, I had that injection also, but guess what, the this is not I'm not gonna make you feel good when I say this next thing Scare you.
Zibby: Yeah, it's gonna come back.
Samantha: I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm actually getting it on the other side.
Zibby: Oh no.
Samantha: Years later.
And they did tell me that happens so often. It's so common. The, I think that the main difference and the reason why it's not so terrible is because I actually know how to deal with it now. Whereas previously, like what you're experience, I bet for a long time you thought that you had an injury and you let it rest.
Zibby: Yep.
Samantha: Which actually makes it. Deepen and get so much worse.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: So at least there's that.
Zibby: That's true. Yes. There's that. Not just power.
Samantha: No, I'm so sorry. I honestly think that frozen shoulders is one of the worst things that I've experienced. Like I definitely thought my arm would never be restored.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: To its previous levels of mobility, but it was it, and it is fine.
Zibby: So I had a renewed empathy for people who struggled to put things in the overhead compartments. I was always like, why is this such an issue for people? They're like I can't do it. And all of a sudden I was like, honey.
Samantha: I don't like I wanna add a joke to the show actually, which is not really a joke, but it's just the truth that I have not put on a bra in a state of comfort and ease since 2017, that stands, that holds true. Even today.
Zibby: The fact that bras are still so impossible to put on is a thing in and of itself you should talk about on your next show.
Samantha: Do you know what? That's so funny. That's a great show. I'm gonna write that down.
Zibby: What the heck? I like have to put it in.
Then I turn it around every time. It's like ridiculous.
Samantha: It's very unfair when you think about it. I know. Why know? Why don't they open in the front? It's just to keep us, just to keep it real for us. Just to keep us humble.
Zibby: So antiquated. Obviously there are sports brass, but still, even now, the sports bras have that thing.
Samantha: The sports brass are terrible too, because then you're struggling into it. It's like putting on a Spanx or whatever. It's like, it's a it's humiliating to put on.
Zibby: And off if it's ever and off sweaty or whatever. It's gro it's so hard. You're like struggling.
Samantha: It's, you struggle, you look awful.
Your boobs go into a tube. They're just, they're, yeah. There's a better way. We should go into business together.
Zibby: Let's do it. I'm all for it. Yes. I would love a better solution. Yes, for sure. And you're so funny in the show just saying like. There obviously is not a God because all these things could not happen.
If there was a God, they would not let this happen to our bodies. Women's bodies would not be like punished in this way. It was just, yeah.
Samantha: If there was a, if we had a merciful God, we wouldn't be, they wouldn't be like, you know what, perimenopause starts whenever.
Zibby: Yep.
Samantha: And it lasts from, I don't know, seven years to forever.
Yeah. Anyway, good luck.
Zibby: Yeah.
No way to know. No, we didn't. Real treatment.
Samantha: We didn't, you're definitely gonna get it wrong. Everybody's going to, we're all just taking guesses and there it's, we frame our entire medical system on like a hundred years ago you wouldn't have lived this long, so we don't really know anything.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: We stopped trying to figure it out.
Zibby: And of course you contrast that with all that we know about men, which is extensive. That there is a remedy, everything. And you are so funny when you're just like, oh yeah your kidneys. There's something for that, like for everything. But your ovaries just stop making eggs and everyone's okay.
Samantha: Yeah.
It's like the only organ in the human body that it stops. Like even it just slows down and everybody's I don't know what to do about that. I guess we just let, I guess we just let them wither anyways, whatever.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: Good luck again, once again. Good luck, ladies. Yeah, enjoy. We don't know what happens to you after you can't make babies anymore.
I think you just take care of your children's children anyways. We don't care.
Zibby: Really, your whole show is just a way to make all of us. Feel a little bit better about aging and like the, yes, all the indignities of it and the things that we have to wake up and deal with each day. And not even necessarily wanna tell anybody because we're like, oh, is that just me?
Samantha: And you know, I do think that, really aging. Listen, aging is definitely not for the week. We all know this, but there's glory to it. There, it's not all bad things, but we should be able to freely talk about the things that do happen. Like I don't know why we've just framed it as this like embarrassing time period.
I love talking about it. I actually think that finding community and talking about these very real things, it's not complaining. Of course I'm complaining, but it's. But it's not just that. It's not just belly aching, it's like community. Can we just say this stuff out loud, like I still, I'll say this, I'm gonna say this right now.
I still say the words vaginal dryness, and people cringe. They physically cringe. I'm like, you've got to make it nicer for us. You've got to pla. Let's all learn how to look placid when someone says vaginal dryness. Because honestly, if I watch a baseball game, I hear the words erectile dysfunction. 800 times, and I don't, my face doesn't change.
I don't do anything. I'm just exposed to. I, we have full exposure to the, to, to the myriad of conditions that can befall a man's body as he ages, and that's wonderful for them. I just want that for us.
Zibby: I think we might need a better phrase like.
Samantha: Sure.
Zibby: Like erectile dysfunction can sound medical enough. Medical, you don't immediately think of the name of the body part and get an image. Do you know what I mean?
Samantha: Yeah.
Zibby: Whereas I think. Yeah, I think we need a rebrand.
Samantha: A rebrand would be nice.
Zibby: If we want people to really accept and start talking about it.
Samantha: I think it's the idea.
Really. I want that for us.
Zibby: You work on that name and, okay.
Samantha: I will, I'm gonna workshop.
Zibby: You're gonna have a whole to-do list after this conversation. Sorry.
Samantha: I'm writing, I'm literally writing myself a note workshop. New term.
Zibby: I just interviewed a bunch of the contributors to this new anthology called Midlife Private Parts, which you have to read.
It's coming out soon. But as I did this 30 minute podcast, I was like, and we do retreats at my company. I'm like, we need to do just like an aging day.
Samantha: Yes.
Zibby: So like you have to come. Okay. If you do this, I'm gonna ask you and
Samantha: Yes, please.
Zibby: Because this is all people our age kind of wanna talk about, like your joke about DoorDash jeans and you're like, if you know, if you don't know, get off this, get away from this.
Yeah. This whole thing like. It just, it is the thing that I feel like is most isolating right now. All of this stuff.
Samantha: It's quite isolating. And I do talk, as I do the show, it's actually 'cause I'm still touring it and I'm, and it's growing and changing and I've added a chunk, which is about really Gen X women.
Because we say all the hard parts out loud. And that's been the tradition that's been our way, like as a generation of women, we've been the first, we're like right out the gate, we're like, we talk about our periods. We're not afraid to talk about that. And so I think that is continuing and we're gonna make it nicer for everybody else.
That's our job. We kick open those barn doors, we say all the hard parts so that everybody can live in a state of greater comfort. Not to say perfection, but we are very good at opening those conversations. 'cause I think that the generation directly prior to us still was not talking about it. I never heard one word about menopause growing up.
Not a single word. I saw it on. I saw Edith Bunker have a hot flash.
Zibby: Did you? I don't remember that times.
Samantha: Yeah. Edith Bunker had a hot flash and Ma for sure, Maude.
Zibby: Yep.
Samantha: And then I don't think I saw it really rendered again on television until I watched a Danish show. We're not really our levels of exposure to very real, very normal things.
It's quite low.
Zibby: So really what we're doing is paving the way for that's
Samantha: Yeah.
Zibby: Our daughters and their daughters. That's right. So they can complain. That's huge. Openly all the time without all the time. Blink of an eye .
Samantha: Yes, that's right. Definitely my 16-year-old son has begged me openly to stop saying the word menopause in our household.
He's can you just cool it for the rest of today? So he is very familiar with the concept and I think that's, this is trendsetting stuff.
Zibby: When I started listening to your, or your Audible original, my 10-year-old son was nearby and I was like, Hey, wanna listen to this audible original about menopause?
And he was like, and he was like, what's menopause? And I was like, let's find out together.
Samantha: There you go. Yes. I'm getting a lot of feedback. I actually have a lot of men in the audience. For when I do these live shows, like a lot of partners, there's a lot of like couples elbowing each other during the show.
There's just a lot of like physicality and it's actually very interesting and as I go, I do interviews and stuff like that, and nail hosts are like, that's so funny. My wife is going through this. Should I tell her to listen? I'm like, you listen. Yeah, you listen too. It's for both of you.
Zibby: It is on a societal level kind of crazy the way you.
Talk about it that like all women at the same time are going through this complete mood shift of craziness. Not craziness.
Samantha: Yeah.
Zibby: But just to have a huge bedrock of society suddenly be like shaking and having everyone ignore like the earthquake that's going on over there. What does that do?
Especially when women of our age are supposed to be like holding. The ship, like driving the ship and keeping everything steady.
Samantha: Yes. I am writing about this more and more, but it is we really is, it really is to very much simplify things, it really is reverse puberty.
And so imagine having all the responsibilities that we have in our adult lives at the age of 14 as we're going through puberty the first time. That's what it is.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: Like we. Our burdens are greater. Our, our, the things that we juggle are immense. We are working to, I don't know, we're providers, we are counselors.
We have children, we have lives, we have partners. We have big careers. We have to make money. We have to do all these things, but also be of the 14-year-old going through puberty. I couldn't have done. I couldn't, the only thing I could think about at the age of 14 or 15 was, is everybody looking at me?
And does everybody see this zit on my nose?
Zibby: Yep.
Samantha: And just taking like the obsession, the trying to cover a zit was like a full-time job. So it's unimaginable really. And it, and that's that's how I'm reflecting on it now. I'm like, it makes sense that we're feeling this inner turmoil.
Zibby: But meanwhile we all, not we all, but many people at this age also do have kids who are literally going through that right now.
Going through it. Yeah. So it's not like we can forget it. It's so it's like almost surround sound in a way. But anyway, surround sound, yes, it's every, hormones are everywhere.
Samantha: They're going all over the place.
Zibby: Deep, deep thoughts this morning. Deep thoughts.
Samantha: There's pheromones everywhere in your home.
You are getting sprinkled every
Zibby: room in the house.
Did you have any second thoughts about talking so openly about this? Did anyone, like on your team say, are you sure you wanna go down this path? Was there anything like that?
Samantha: I would say yes. I wouldn't say that it just didn't come from my team, but it did come from the outside world a little bit, and every, everybody on my team has been really super supportive the whole time.
But it ha I have heard that from people. They're like, Ooh, are you sure? Which, I, yeah, I'm sure I never really wavered from it. I think that it was very, it actually was very difficult for me to talk about at first when I first launched or lurched, I guess into perimenopause. I was, it was around 2018, like 20 17, 20 18, so I was in my late forties and it was really, it was tumultuous, like it was a really rocky road.
It was really not fun. I was fine, like it didn't ruin my life or anything, but I definitely was like white knuckle, gripping my life and really pretending. Really pretending hard to have it all together and had a very wild inner life which was difficult. And then I started being able to talk about it, and then I did, I wanted to do an episode about it on full frontal, which I did.
But even then, even at that point, I found it very vulnerable to talk about. I was really vulnerable and I had this incredible writing staff and they were writing hilarious jokes for me. And a lot of the jokes, I simply couldn't say, I couldn't say them out loud. They made me cry, and they weren't intentionally me.
They weren't, they were just funny jokes that I wasn't ready to tell because I was right in the heart of it. And that I never forgot that. That held a lot of meaning for me. And I just started writing about it really. I just started writing about it and thinking about it, and it became, when the opportunity came along to do a show, to do a performance for Audible, I really leaned into it.
I thought, this is what I wanna talk about because I. It's a burden for people. And I'm not afraid to talk about myself. I say embarrassing. I say and do embarrassing things. That's my job. That is my literal job. And so couldn't I just tell people this story? If it makes one person feel seen at all, that's, I needed that and I couldn't find that.
That didn't exist. I'm talking like 2018. Nobody was talking about menopause and not. A damn soul. And that is not even 10 years ago. So we are talking about it now. We are talking about it. The conversation is cracking open the word is on everybody's lips, but that absolutely did not exist when I was in it.
So I feel like that's my job. I feel like that's my job and it's a pleasure. 'cause when I perform this show in front of people and I see their faces and I can feel there's a synergy, there's a communion when you're performing live and you feel it, you're having a shared experience with people who are in the audience with you, and you feel how hungry they are to have an entertainment that is directly for them.
It's exciting. I love doing it, and now I can talk about it very freely and I don't care. And when I say vaginal dryness, which again, we are workshopping a better terminology. That's not, we don't want it to be odine. Like it shouldn't be too generic.
Zibby: No, it not generic.
Samantha: It should still say the thing. Yeah, it's just the same, the thing,..
Zibby: Maybe it's not the body part.
Samantha: Maybe.
Zibby: Maybe.
Samantha: I maybe. We'll see.
Zibby: I'll think on it.
Samantha: We'll see. Okay. We'll think we're thinking, but when I talk now, I can really talk about that stuff and I've, it's like I've said it so many times now, it's like doing Scientology. It's like I've been hooked up to an e-meter and I just keep repeating the same concepts so that I can talk about them.
And I actually think that's what we need. So I'm doing it, so I love it.
Zibby: Are you gonna do like a part two? Maybe not about menopause specifically, but just like keeping this going.
Samantha: I think keeping it going is a very, it's very helpful to me as well as an exercise. I like talking about aging. I'm not really afraid of it.
I really grew up. I grew up around older people. I grew up, very raised by my grandmother in a lot of ways, and so I've been around older people and embraced, been in there, embrace my whole life. It's not as, I don't have, I don't love how janky my body is. I don't love like waking up in the morning and.
Sort of struggling to bend over and pull my socks on sometimes. Yeah. I don't love my frozen shoulders, but everything else, I do love the wisdom and I do love, I mostly like it more, if that makes any sense.
Zibby: Of course yeah. If you're not getting anything out of it yourself, why do it also, right?
Samantha: Hundred percent.
Zibby: It's the writing and yeah,
Samantha: I'm doing it. I guess I'm primarily doing it for myself. Yeah, it's, there's an un I wouldn't have known about it before. I wouldn't have been able to predict it, but it has become, I'm a very, I'm very passionate about writing about it, and I enjoy it thoroughly.
I feel better. I feel good. I feel good when I walk down the street and I get mad about something that has happened and then I go, oh, I gotta write that down. That's an indignity. It's not just me experiencing it. And I'm not even getting the worst of it, so I love it.
Zibby: That's amazing. How do you feel when you're doing interviews and talking to people all the time.
What else is coming up the most for you? This is one issue that's on your mind. Like what else are you, do you find conversations veering towards?
Samantha: A lot of, you'd be shocked how many people wanna talk to me about menopause. So many people I am finding everywhere I go, people are like, by the way.
Did you know that you can have a reverse hot flash, which is called a cold flash? Horrible.
Zibby: I did not know that.
Samantha: Yep. You can be also learn something freezing cold, you can turn into a block of ice.
Zibby: Great.
Samantha: I do think that people want to talk to me about the political world, certainly. Most conver, I think most conversations in the general population turned to politics now.
Zibby: Yep.
Samantha: I certainly. It dovetails. You know what I think and write about the most certainly dovetails with the political system we're living in and the people who represent us and the head of Health and Human Services, who is really just.
Stalling all research into women's bodies. Anything gendered at all is like off the table. All money that had what had been previously allocated to actually studying menopause is paused or off the table now. So that is, it's incredibly worrying and I could, talk about that kind of endlessly too.
So conversation does go in that direction as well as I'm sure you would expect it's. We don't know what to do. Nobody knows what to do.
Zibby: How did you become you? Like how did you get to this point in your life? How did you become like the comedian, the talk show host, the everything? Like how did you grow up thinking you, what did you want to be like?
How did this happen?
Samantha: This was never this. I can honestly say that this was never an aspiration. Never. I did not. I certainly absorbed and, I ingested a lot of comedy by women growing up. It was just in my world to watch Carol Burnett every day to watch sketch comedy, to watch SCTV, like I Love Lucy.
It was all there for me and I, and it enriched my life completely. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so I knew that I would go to college. Just it just, in order to go to college, I knew that I wanted to be professional. That was. The only, I'm an only child. That was really the only thing that I knew was that I would take that mantle and go run with it and go to college and make good.
I thought that I would end up in law school 'cause I'm smart and good at school. In that Catholic school girl way, people pleasing and nobody really had any. Aspirations for me on my behalf. Nobody was like, you have to go to college and do that. But I thought this will be my, this is my job.
And I took an elective at college. It was theater. I thought it would be very easy. And I was ki I'm shy. I was always funny but shy, not the class clown. Nothing like that. Very funny to my friends, rye. Sense of humor. My dad is very funny. I took a theater class, I stepped out onto stage and I thought, oh, I should do this.
This is actually what I wanna do. I actually love being on stage. I'm not afraid. When I'm on stage, I'm my full. I am a. A full self. I'm a full being. I feel my back. I feel my sides. I feel my front. I can breathe. I'm so comfortable on a stage. I don't know why. It's to, it's innate. I didn't know anything about theater, absolutely no aspirations.
And then when I stepped onto a comedy stage, which really was an opportunity that came to me just because people who I knew who did comedy thought why aren't you doing comedy? You can just do it, and that's a stage you can step on anytime you want because no one ever pays you for it.
So actually, it's very easy. Never expect to get paid or go anywhere in your future. You can do comedy anytime you want. And so I started doing that and it just kept. Growing and eventually, after many years of not working at all. And not at all because I didn't know I wasn't really an ingenue.
I'm just me. I'm not like, I don't walk into a room and light it up, like you don't. I don't walk into the grocery store and everybody goes, I gotta get her for something. I just am like a normal person. I, she's got to be in my movie like not at all. And eventually I started doing comedy more, and then I started doing this comedy with this all female comedy troupe and just opportunities presented themselves.
And I always said yes to it, even though it was very difficult and there was no expectation of success. And it has just been a story of saying yes and working really hard. I have worked really hard and learned from the people around me. I met my husband and my partner when I was doing comedy. He was also doing comedy.
I learned from his work ethic, like he taught me how to sit down and write for myself. He taught, I, I learned by looking to his example, and I've always done that and I've somehow finagled these opportunities. Yeah, I got an opportunity to audition for The Daily Show, which was my favorite show in the world in 2003, and I thought, oh, I'll just, I'll try.
I won't, I'm not gonna get this job. This is too good a job. Impossible, but I'm gonna try for it Like I've never tried for anything in all my life. I'm gonna put everything I have for the next two weeks into this audition, and I'm gonna be so comfortable when I go in there. That I will be like undeniably.
It will be a great experience for me, not for them. They're not gonna hire me. That's not my problem. I just wanted to walk out clean. I walked, I wanted to walk out clean, to know that when they didn't hire me, it was their mistake and I had done the best job and I had, could have no regrets. And I did, and then they hired me.
So I just it just was building, like literally building block building, block writing, writing with no expectation of anything. Learning, growing, failing, succeeding. It's a big stew and that is truly, 30 years of that. And here we are today, but but really it's not a sexy story.
Of instant Marvel. It's a long, normal story of working very hard and finding a way to I don't always even, I wanna say finding a way to believe in myself, but I don't always believe in myself. Often. I'm like, what? Oh, stop it. I don't always believe in myself, but in general, at the same time, I've just, I am a confident person. And so I just step into opportunities when they come my way and I say no to things that I know are not right for me very confidently. So I don't wanna say it's accidental. But I don't wanna say, and it's not really, can't really imitate it. You can never take someone else's path.
This just was my path of a very Canadian tractor, like continuous forward motion.
Zibby: I love that.
Samantha: Slow, continuous tilling of a field.
Zibby: But how? How do you know how to say no? I feel like for the people pleasers among us. I feel like there's this instinct to always be like, okay, sure, I can fit that in.
Samantha: I think it's just actually getting a little bit older is a gift because it gives you that, it gives you an understanding that your time on earth is finite. And it does. It does. I think. Or it can, or I hope it does for people, order the priorities very naturally because you do start to understand that your resources are finite and you need to focus on the things that you love.
Like at this stage of my personal life, I am focusing only on the things that feed me either creatively or financially. Sometimes you have to do that too, but like the things that are creating forward motion, the people that I love, the friendships. That are, that don't make me feel small. You get better at cutting out the people in your life and the things in your life that make you feel small. You get better at cultivating, at kind of curating experiences. You get better at saying, I don't, I'm not gonna to thank you so much. I can't go to your party. Ugh. I'm not available for that, and I'm not gonna tell you why.
I'm not gonna lie. You just, you get better at ending the sentence and offering no opportunity for follow up questions. And it's so okay. Like you get good at answering questions in a way that people don't go. But why though? You're just like, it's not happening. Let's just, we're still friends. I love you. I can't go to, I hate parties.
I love you and I hate parties, and I get very anxious at them, so I don't go to them. I hope you have a great night.
Zibby: Gosh, I love that. I just said to my husband the other night, I, 'cause we were gonna go to this like cocktails and program and dinner and I was like why do we have to stay for the dinner? Yeah, we're getting, we'll see everybody at the cocktails.
Samantha: Yeah.
Zibby: The program I'm really interested in, but like, why do I have to sit next to a stranger and have a longer talk with this person than my like best friend who I never get to see?
Samantha: No, don't.
Zibby: I was like, don't do it. What if we just stop staying for dinners? Is that a thing? Are you allowed to do that?
Samantha: You are totally.
Zibby: Oh, shoot. I'm totally overtime. I'm so sorry.
Samantha: Oh no I'm, I have not, I don't, you can use me as you will. I'm not yeah, no, you can leave. You should leave.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: And you know what the thing is, nobody will even know I.
Zibby: Yeah, nobody cares.
Samantha: Nobody. It's fine.
Zibby: Yeah.
Samantha: They all wanna leave too. Yeah. You can be the pioneer.
Zibby: I'm gonna be the pioneer. No more.
Samantha: Yes. I love this.
Zibby: Sam, thank you so much. I had so much fun. Obviously I could talk to you all day and thank you for your show, but also just your voice in general, so thank you.
Samantha: Thank you for yours. This was a lovely opportunity. It was so nice to see you and talk to you.
Zibby: You too. All right. Thank you. Bye bye.
Samantha Bee, HOW TO SURVIVE MENOPAUSE
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