Samantha Bee doesn’t want to talk about menopause. But as she puts it, she must.
The Emmy-winning comedian and former host of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is hitting the stage in a deeply personal, hilarious one-woman show titled “How to Survive Menopause,” coming to Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, September 6th.
While the topic may be taboo for some, Bee leans into it head-on because she knows exactly how isolating and confusing the experience can be.
“It came about because I knew my show had ended, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next,” Bee shared. “I knew that I wasn’t really ready to not work at all or to not write, that’s just so a part of my personality … I really only have to work on things that I really feel passionately about.”
With “How to Survive Menopause,” Bee blends comedy with community, vulnerability with validation. It’s a show that’s not just for women experiencing menopause, but for anyone who wants to understand it better.
Bee didn’t originally plan for a career in comedy, let alone one centered around personal storytelling.
“It’s not like I started my career thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll go into political comedy professionally.’ It didn’t… almost would not have seemed like a real job,” she recalled. “But I always was a comedy fan… The more I tried to pursue a serious acting career, the more people were like, ‘Actually, you’re very funny.’”
Eventually, she listened. What began as a passion project evolved into an impressive comedic resume, landing her a spot on The Daily Show and eventually her own show on TBS.
But as her career shifted, so did her body. And suddenly, menopause became impossible to ignore.
“It really was a period of great confusion, and it was pretty painful,” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening to me… I had trouble talking about perimenopause and menopause, because very little [was known] about it… and because it felt really vulnerable.”
Even for someone who made her name tackling controversial topics on television, the experience was challenging.
“It took a couple of years before I really (felt) I could talk about it openly,” she admitted.
While touring a previous show, Bee noticed how audiences responded to even brief mentions of menopause.
“Anytime I talked about menopause on stage, people went really crazy for it,” she said. “Like I realized kind of that my audience was in a really similar position where I had been.”
So she leaned in, developing “How to Survive Menopause” as an honest, cathartic, and hilarious space for anyone experiencing or curious about this often-overlooked stage of life.
“If I’m able to talk about this with tremendous humor and catharsis, I feel like that’s what I want to do,” she said. “I want to make it easier for people to say hard things out loud.”
Bee described the show as “such a pleasure to perform,” adding, “I like to do it in a pretty intimate setting. Or I can, like, see people’s faces… I find it really nourishing.”
While menopause is slowly entering public discourse, Bee is quick to point out just how recent that shift is and how much further there is to go.
“I mean, even today, when you go to medical school… they talk about menopause for between one and three hours,” she said. “This is a huge phase of a woman’s life… Our bodies haven’t been studied. So how can we even talk about it?”
For Bee, simply saying the word out loud is a powerful act. “If people know that it exists, for one thing, if you’ve heard the word before, that’s just very helpful,” she said.
She hopes the show encourages conversation across generations, genders and communities to break the stigma and isolation that often surround menopause.
“One of the best things you can do for yourself… is to talk about it with people, to create a community around it,” she said. “And I really didn’t have that. So I’m trying to create that.”
Despite the heavy themes, “How to Survive Menopause” is not a lecture. It’s a fun, engaging, and refreshingly honest experience that also happens to be funny.
“It’s really fun. We’re just there to have a good time… It’s a short show. I’m very respectful of a menopausal woman’s time,” she joked. “They usually like to do early shows. We’re all digesting our meals.”
She also loves that the show sparks feedback and sometimes wild revelations from the audience. “People send me letters all the time… they have the weirdest symptoms, and so I’m learning from them,” she laughed. “People are like, ‘My feet are so itchy,’ and I’m like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’”
For Bee, it’s not about perfection, it’s about honesty. “We’ve been talking about men’s erectile dysfunction for, like, decades,” she said. “We see commercials for it… Well, I would like to do the same thing for menopause.”
