Book review: ‘I Know I Am, But What Are You?’ by Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee has proved her mettle as a reliable arbiter of fake news over the course of hundreds of appearances on “The Daily Show.” The program’s most senior correspondent — she started in 2003 — she possesses a perverse, off-kilter comic style that often subversively caresses real enlightenment while simultaneously making us laugh.

Bee loses nothing in translation to the page. In her first book, “I Know I Am, But What Are You?,” she recounts the weirdest moments from her dysfunctional life. The essays here engulf us in a tidal wave of strangeness, yet underneath the joke-filled surface, there’s a very sweet comic memoir to be found.

From her struggles as a child to her struggles as an adult, Bee revels in her bizarre behavior, writing with a straight face, an arched eyebrow and an unflinching sense of assuredness. Indeed, what’s appealing about her stories is precisely that she takes such powerful ownership of her peculiarities.

Of course, it’s easy to embrace Bee’s quirks from a reader’s distance. We may not all be so self-aware, but we can all relate to some degree. But her parents? Not so much.

“I was forever tragically stamped with the reputation that I am hard to handle and as changeable as a summer breeze....,” she writes. “I somehow warped my parents to the degree that they literally can’t believe I am a good parent, that my husband loves me or that I don’t have some kind of sex dungeon in my house with a bunch of dried-up scrotums on the wall.” On this, we have to take her at her word.

Bee explains that she was behind the eight ball from Day One. First, she was born in Canada. Then, her teenaged parents got divorced when she was an infant, making her a child of divorce from a family for whom divorce was something of a tradition.

Growing up, she bounced around like a Super Ball, shuttled between her mom, dad and grandmother, each of whom attempted to mold the impressionable child in a different way, leaving her with a case of “acute and crippling shyness.”

“I Know I Am, But What Are You?” connects most tightly when Bee examines her family’s attempts to normalize her, which, of course, only serves to reveal how utterly unhinged everyone around her was.

There are some priceless moments of family bonding, including one that introduces the Canadian ritual known as rock and roll camping, which involves driving to an isolated parking lot near some trees, drinking copious amounts of liquor and cranking Bachman Turner Overdrive until you pass out.

Bee describes her father as something of a slug on these wilderness adventures, but expresses real admiration for her stepmom Marilyn’s ability to transform into a perm-wearing Martha Stewart of the forest. “Our campsite was so tidy it looked like the forest floor had been vacuumed,” Bee explains.

As for Bee, she’s just all-around unusual — prone to unhealthy obsessions over feather-haired camp counselors and even Jesus, whom she imagines as a dreamy cross between Kenny Loggins and 1970s-era Kris Kristofferson. “I knew that one day He would make himself known to me and we would be able to actualize the throbbing Tiger Beat style L-U-V that we felt for each other,” she writes.

Bee’s mother finally shakes her daughter’s crush on Jesus by taking her to a Wiccan wedding, and the preteen moves onto more wholesome activities such as orchestrating kinky sex orgies with Ken, Barbie, G.I. Joe and Wonder Woman dolls (“It was basically like Caligula in there,” she tells us) or sitting on the phone with her first boyfriend, not talking, just breathing, for hours at a time.

Only while with her grandmother does the young Bee feel at peace — she has a real connection with the older woman, who leaves her with a plethora of valuable knowledge, such as the importance of granny panties as “a clean absorbent cotton insurance policy against what is going to happen to you in the future should you happen to laugh and sneeze at the same time.”

As Bee blooms into a young adult, her tales become less idiosyncratic. There are moments of great mirth, including her strategy when cornered by strange men: “The nuclear option was to poop in your own pants. Nobody messes with a girl who is willing to poop in her own pants.” Still, the later stories feel superficial — chapters about her various jobs or the etiquette of gift giving that operate more as excuses for punch lines than as fully developed experiences.

But if Bee occasionally lets a good joke smother the narrative, she’s earned the right. If only all dysfunction were this funny.

Himmelsbach is a Los Angeles writer and producer.