Samantha Bee takes on menopause in a head-on and hilarious way as only she can.

“Scary” was how Samantha Bee described the feeling as her body began going through changes that worried her, during the time she was producing and hosting her critically acclaimed late-night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. She experienced mood swings, forgetfulness, crying and hair falling out in clumps.

“I attributed all of these changes to my body and my mind to this high-pressure job situation and raising three kids in New York City, but there was actually something metabolic in my body and I wish I would have known that because I would have felt less frightened,” she told CBS Mornings in 2024, when her one-woman show How to Survive Menopause was running off-Broadway.

Once Bee had a name for what she was experiencing, perimenopause, she did what she has always done after 12 years as the longest-running correspondent on The Daily Show and seven seasons on TBS with Full Frontal: She confronted the topic in her own unflinchingly honest and funny way.

“If we cannot laugh at this, we will cry – and we will cry, but we should laugh,” she said.

She did a segment on menopause on Full Frontal in 2022, and from there developed the stage show, with hopes of helping women feel seen and give them a chance for shared laughter over a topic that’s been taboo in society for too long.

“I can’t even tell you how much I love doing [the show],” Bee told The Express Magazine last August. “I’ve never had the experience of wanting to do a performance more in all my life. It’s a very self-selecting crowd, which is so important to me. Nobody is buying a ticket to this and thinking they’re going to get 45 minutes of Trump jokes.”

When the TBS show ended, Bee was ready to leave political comedy behind. She’s on a new comedic mission to help erase the stigma of menopause and stand up for women of a certain age who’ve suffered in silence for too long.

“I’m so tired of middle-aged women being the butt of every joke,” she said. “I think this is the single most important contribution I can make to the culture right now.”

SAMANTHA BEE performs at 7:30pm Saturday, Feb. 7. Sunset Center, San Carlos and 9th, Carmel. $50-$80. (831) 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org.