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    I Know I Am, But What Are You?
    I Know I Am, But What Are You?
    I Know I Am, But What Are You?
    Audiobook6 hours

    I Know I Am, But What Are You?

    Written by Samantha Bee

    Narrated by Samantha Bee

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Candid, outspoken, laugh-out-loud funny essays from much-loved Samantha Bee, host of TBS's uproarious late-night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, executive producer and writer of TBS's comedy television series The Detour, and former The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s Most Senior Correspondent.

    In I Know I Am, But What Are You? she shares her unique and irreverent viewpoint on subjects as wide-ranging as:

    BARBIE’S DREAM HOUSE
    There were six main players in my coterie: G.I. Joe (macho, good-looking), Wonder Woman (hot, carpet-munching neighbor, busy with athletics), Marie Osmond (career gal, smart), Ken (gay, obviously), regular Barbie (slutty, dumb, eternally single), and an old-timey Barbie from the sixties (smoker’s cough, swinger).

    HER CHILDHOOD CRUSH
    I had a notebook dedicated to ironing out the details of my postmarital name change. Samantha Christ. Mrs. Jesus H. Christ. In fact, Jesus and I were so tight that if at any moment He should materialize, I knew we would listen to my disco records and eat Tang straight from the package, just like lovers did.

    GYM CLASS
    My grandmother would send me in a navy-blue, puffy-sleeved, one-piece cashmere sweat suit with a patent-leather belt, and warn me not to sweat in it, since it was dry-clean only.

    FAMILY TIES
    There’s really nothing creepier than going somewhere with one of your parents and having people think you are together, as a couple. Of lovers. Who do it. With each other.

    Editor's Note

    Car thievery to comedy…

    Before Samantha Bee became the first female host of a late-night comedy show or a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” she stole cars. This candid memoir goes through Bee’s bizarre career from car thievery to comedy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9780743599894
    Author

    Samantha Bee

    Samantha Bee lives with her husband, also former Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones, and their children in New York City.

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    Reviews for I Know I Am, But What Are You?

    3.5/5

    203 ratings22 reviews

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    • 5/5
      She is a great storyteller. I could not put it down
    • 2/5
      I finished this book out of will to at least finish one book since I have been on not finishing streak. I didn’t enjoy this one that much. A couple of funny moments but not engaging.
    • 5/5
      I really like the way she told her story I feel like we were the same person growing up in different places
    • 5/5
      I loved it ... Samantha is so hilarious and only she could read it as it should be read!!
    • 4/5
      Samantha Bee was one weird little kid. But that made for a fun and interesting listen.
    • 4/5
      I'm more convinced she's my spirit animal. Funny, weird, uncomfortable. A fun time. Definitely difficult reading on my commute and trying to not be the weird one on the bus smiling and laughing to herself. But then again, nobody bothered me when I was...Funny, weird, uncomfortable. An overall good time.
    • 3/5
      From my Cannonball Read V Review...

      This book was a bit of an experiment for me. I enjoy memoirs and essays from female authors (Ali in Wonderland, Bossypants, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?), and have read them imagining them narrated by the authors themselves, hearing Tina Fey in my mind. I run for exercise, so I figured I’d take on the audiobook option as part of this Cannonball Read and find some fun memoirs to get me through my workouts.

      My first purchase (via audible.com) was Samantha Bee’s cleverly titled I Know I Am, But What Are You? In it she chronicles her life, sharing some interesting stories, some funny stories, and some tragically funny stories.

      Born to teenage parents, she spent time living with her mother, her dad and stepmom, and her grandmother. As a child she was an introvert, an animal lover, and obsessed with Jesus. Not so much in a religion sort of way, but in an ‘I’m going to wash his feet and marry him” sort of way. That story was easily my favorite of the book, although her treatise on gift-giving and -receiving is a close second.

      She definitely has some interesting stories to tell, but I only found myself laughing out loud a couple of times. I’m not sure if that was even her goal. But I think I would have preferred to read this as opposed to listen to her reading of it. She reads it pretty much exactly as she narrates her segments on “The Daily Show,” and while that works in four-minute Republican take-downs, it can sometimes be a bit much in book form.

      I’d say this would probably be best as a library book or a sale book loaded onto your e-reader for reading on a flight or on vacation.
    • 4/5
      A fun collection of stories of Samantha Bee's childhood. Mostly not chronological. I find her to be more relatable than other female comedians whose memoirs I have read, in an almost unsettling way. If you're looking for real insight into her celebrity life and work at The Daily Show, look elsewhere. But if you'd like entertaining anecdotes from a weird childhood, this is your book.My only complaint is that this book is now 6 years old and so I'd like her to write another. Because she totally doesn't have anything else to do right now (just kidding).
    • 4/5
      This is one of the funniest books that I've read in a LONG time. I giggled the whole way through it -- out loud -- sometimes I had to stop because tears were coming to my eyes. She reminds me of Augusten Burroughs without all the really serious tragedy. I give it a four only because I AM the May/December relationship girl, and society can kiss my black ass. :) If nothing else go to the bookstore and read the chapter about Jesus being her boyfriend... it's the third or fourth and aptly titled.

      DEFINITELY worth the read.
    • 4/5
      So funny! I love her and this book is hilarious and cute, which is a weird thing to say about a book but I think it fits for this book. I loved every second of this book, and everyone should read it.
    • 3/5
      Samantha Bee, best known for her job as a "correspondent" on The Daily Show, offers up a humorous sort-of-a-memoir, in which she talks about her parents and her misspent youth and tells wacky stories about her experiences with pets, flashers, and bad Christmas gifts. A lot of it is dirty, and a surprising amount of it is downright appalling (especially her descriptions of the kind of things she got up to as a teenager). Her writing style is generally pretty funny -- not necessarily laugh-out-loud hilarious, but amusing. Her subject matter, though, sometimes gets a little uncomfortable for me. I like to think I have a fairly uninhibited sense of humor, but there does seem to be a limit to how much I can laugh at stories that involve sexual predators going after thirteen-year-old girls, or people neglecting their pets. The frequent jokes about things like how disgusting she finds the idea of elderly people having sex got a little old, too, especially as I'm on the side of the seniors on that one. I say, enjoy yourselves as long as you can, guys!
    • 5/5
      Having recently read Sarah Silverman's book Bedwetter, I decided, apparently, to conduct a tour of favorite female comics. Anyway, unlike Silverman, Bee actually manages to construct a book that is plausibly biographical. It's made of anecdotes, but by connecting them with words like "then" and "so, next" an impression of linearity and narrative coherence is subtly conveyed. (Sorry Sarah! Luv you!) It also contains some genuinely funny material that you probably haven't heard Bee perform. Her early career in juvenile delinquency and car thievery, her mind blowing (parent cringing) pubescent experiments in self-endangerment with shady over-age men, her experiences with compulsive pet acquisition and neglect, and her humiliating involvement with cheesy fourth rate theater that led her to meet Jason Jones, all made it very difficult for my spouse to fall asleep as I read in bed. Not only did I have to laugh, but I had to wake her up to read about the cat that tried to copulate with Samantha's head. Unlike the Silverman book where you probably had to pre-love the Sarah to grok the book, this one is LOL city even if you haven't experienced Samantha on the Daily Show. It's light as a feather, but lots of fun.

      Now I'd better go read a book about the Holocaust, just so I don't float away.
    • 3/5
      Eh. There were a few actual laugh-out-loud moments, but mostly I thought this would be funnier.
    • 3/5
      Fun, breezy read with some hearty laughs and lots of chuckles along the way. I was expecting a memoir; this reads more as a somewhat scattered series of reflections on aspects of Ms. Bee's life. Her observations on some of her experiences can be outrageously funny - the scenes of the male strip club and near-raping by a pet cat come to mind - but I can't say these added up to much of a portrait of the lady as a whole. Maybe deep autobiographical insights are too much to ask of a book like this.
    • 2/5
      I had high hopes for this book. I have always liked Samantha on The Daily Show and I have read many books of humorous essays, but most of the book just wasn't funny. They read like essays that weren't quite good enough for NPR.
    • 4/5
      I love Sam Bee on The Daily Show and this book was just as good as a live report. It kept me laughing till the end, which I was sad to be at. You must have a sense to love this book and Sam Bee.
    • 4/5
      Samantha Bee's essay collection is funny and engaging, going through the story of her life and sharing hilarious and/or embarrassing anecdotes from her past. I truly enjoyed the book, but I also found it surprisingly depressing at times. Maybe it's just because I wasn't expecting to read about young girls getting almost-raped, even when told in a funny way? Or all the sexual harassment? At least not presented in such a light fashion. Not that Bee makes fun of the topic itself - but rather it was an all-too-unfortunate reminder that this is part of day-to-day life for far too many young ladies. It just seemed oddly prevalent throughout the book. But I liked the package, and was especially charmed by Bee's account of how she met her husband.
    • 3/5
      From Amazon: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.My Thoughts:This memoir is told in a series of essays each recounting a cringe-worthy story from Bee's childhood or adolescence. Now most of our childhoods and certainly adolescences offer material galore in the humor department but it takes talent to write and package those scenes into funny, sardonic essays with just the right amount of detail. Samantha Bee definitely has a self-deprecating sense of humor and is not afraid to make fun of her younger self which makes for a more humorous story. With divorced and somewhat eccentric parents, Bee seemed older than her years as a child watching and assessing the exploits of her parents. She may not have realized it at the time but all that observation would turn into a funny, entertaining book!The author I can most easily compare Bee to is David Sedaris - she has a similar sarcastic tone and tells personal stories as he does - however, I think her book approaches the humor found in a David Sedaris story. I definitely found myself laughing out loud but I feel Sedaris is just that little bit more witty and exacting in his prose. With that said, I Know I Am, But What Are You?, takes dysfunction and makes it funny - and maybe makes us all feel just a little bit better about our own childhoods!FYI - Although I read it in print, I think this book would likely be excellent in audio (check out S. Krishna's review of the audio) as I am sure Samantha would deliver her witty one-liners with just the right inflection.
    • 4/5
      i know i am, but what are you? by Samantha BeePublished by Gallery Books/A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.ISBN 978-1-4391-4273-8At the request of Gallery Books, a HC was sent, at no charge to me, for my honest opinion. Synopsis (borrowed from book's jacket): Critics have called her "sweet, adorable, and vicious." But there is so much more to be said about Samantha Bee. For one, she's Canadian. Whatever that means. And now, she opens up for the very first time about her checkered Canadian past. With Charming candor, she admits to her Lennie from Of Mice and Men-style love of a baby animals, her teenage crime spree as one half of a car-thieving couple (Bonnie and Clyde in Bermuda shorts and braces:, and the fact that strangers seem compelled to show her their genitals. She also details her intriguing career history, which includes stints working in a fame store, at a penis clinic, and as a Japanese anime character in a touring children's show. Samantha delves into all these topics and many more in this thoroughly hilarious, unabashedly frank collection of personal essays. Whether detailing the creepiness that ensues when strangers assume that your mom is your lesbian lover or recalling her girlhood crush on Jesus (who looked like Kris Kristofferson and sang like Kenny Loggins), Samantha turns the spotlight on her own imperfect yet highly entertaining life as relentlessly as she skewers hapless interview subjects on The Daily Show. She shares her unique point of view on a variety of subjects as wide-ranging as her deep affinity for old people and her hatred of hot ham. It's all here, in irresistible prose that will leave you in stitches and eager for more. My Thoughts and Opinion: I have stated many times that I am not a TV watcher, so I need to confess, I have never watched the The Daily Show. But, after reading this book and knowing that the author, Samantha Bee is a senior correspondent of that show, there is a good chance I will be watching. The author writes about her dysfunctional family, her childhood antics and even some when she was a bit older. I found myself laughing out loud, chuckling and even at time saying "me too, me too!!!!" Each chapter was equally funny, whereas I couldn't even pick one as my favorite. However, there was one that really had me laughing and that I could really relate to, myself being of the same religion, was Man-Witch. She relates her story of being in a Catholic elementary school and having a "crush" on God. Reading this book now was the best remedy, to escape from "real life" and just laugh. Have this book on hand for when you just need to read something funny and totally entertaining. My Rating: 4
    • 4/5
      Samantha Bee is hilarious, and Canadian. This is not exactly a memoir, more like a book of essays and anecdotes. An autobiomemessoir?She sets up her scenes perfectly. An example: her gut feeling is that May-December pairings are gross and culturally confusing. Sam and her mom are closer in age than is typical (Samantha's mom was a mere teenager), and one day they visited the Woodstock site. Sam is making fun of her mother for acting nostalgic, although on the actual Woodstock weekend, Sam's mother was shopping (in New York) with her own mom, trying to decide between the coral cashmere twinset or the turquoise.Meanwhile, two other visitors amble over, and Sam watches in amusement as her mom tries to sound vague, like maybe she'd been flopping around in Woodstock mud that weekend instead of squirming in and out of cashmere at Bonwit Teller.And then, oh dear lord, one of the visitors made a polite offer to Sam: "Would you like me to take a photo of you and your partner here by the monument?" So Sam's mom gets to laugh at Sam, for now mom is lesbionic, and with a much younger woman at that. ("...Record scratch. Spit take. Comical sputtering. Woman relentlessly making fun of her mother is instantly silenced by elderly do-gooder....")Which is hilarious. Then Sam goes on to relate her own actual disastrous December-May relationship. She's irreverent and often vulgar, but she doesn't spare herself, and because (I remind you) she is Canadian, there is an underlying tenderness toward all creatures, even human ones.
    • 1/5
      I bought this off the discount table to go with other 'Daily Show' related books - Jon Stewart's excellent 'America (The Book)' and Stephen Colbert's passable 'I Am America (And So Can You)'. Ms. Bee is pretty damn funny on video, but this book is barely even amusing. She relates stories from her life that have, perhaps, the seeds of humor, but they don't really sprout. She might have been trying to emulate David Sedaris but lacks the sense of irony he has. There are numerous wacky names and asides that were clearly pasted-on to punch up the funny and they mostly just highlight the lack of a humorous core.
    • 4/5
      In “I know who you are, but what are you?” Samantha Bee takes us to her memories of a very strange childhood. All of her relatives were divorced and she lived with her granny or all by herself in an apartment in the bell tower of an old mansion. This book is crazy with belly laughs. She is very frank about her initiation into sex and sexual history. She is out in the open with taboo subjects, taboo at least in writing. I loved her list of do’s and don’ts for young women made from advice from her grannies. She often saw her experiences through granny eyes which is very quirky. I can say that I have never met anyone like her except for child hood friend who kept jumping trains to get away from her family. I think that she may be the embodiment of quirky, which I love.I would recommend this book to anyone who has an open mind and doesn’t think that little girls and woman have to act “a certain way”.