Samantha Bee: Can Comedians Cover Luigi Mangione—and Should They?

Samantha Bee isn’t afraid to tackle difficult subjects. She famously taped a 2016 episode of her late night show Full Frontal just days after the mass shooting at Pulse, an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, offering an impassioned monologue—"Love does not win, until we start loving each other enough to fix our f--king problems"—and a nuanced ability to engage with heavy topics without making light of them. The current discourse surrounding Luigi Mangione and his alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is no different.

“I have such complicated feelings going into this because I think it’s a horrible story. Violence is never the answer,” Bee said on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast during a conversation about Thompson’s death and its impact.

She shared hopes that the incident will ignite meaningful discussions about the corruption of US healthcare companies. However, such broader implications are complex. As The Daily Beast’s special correspondent Harry Lambert argued, “Wouldn’t that be bad in some way?” Lambert pointed to the lionization of Thompson’s alleged shooter, the 26-year-old Mangione, among online audiences, and what that could mean: “Because then what we’d be saying is, ‘Oh, Luigi, you’ve managed to successfully change the conversation.’”

It’s a catch-22: Should the killing spark healthcare reform—fueling the narrative of Mangione as a “revolutionary” or “Robin Hood” figure—it could normalize violence as a tool for reform; should the discourse fizzle out, an opportunity for change is lost.

(Another factor, according to Bee’s co-host Joanna Coles, is society’s fascination with manhunts. “We love a story of a man on the run,” Coles observed. “There’s always this element of suspense—are they alive? Are they not alive?”)

On the internet’s response to the incident, Bee admitted of Mangione, “I do think it’s funny that he went and ate a bunch of hash browns (at McDonald’s). But I don’t make jokes about someone getting gunned down in the streets.”

As a comedian, Bee often faces questions about the limits of humor. In comedy, if a joke gets a laugh, it works; if it doesn’t, you wince and move on. “How do you know when you’ve gone too far?” she recalled being asked. “I’m not a person who finds murder amusing in the least,” she concluded. That’s a hard limit, no matter how bizarre or engaging the details are.

For others, the boundaries aren’t so clear. With billions of unedited opinions, memes, misinformation and sh-t posts to consider, shock value often drives online discourse and engagement, further escalating chaos and division.

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