‘Full Frontal With Samantha Bee’ Apologizes for Mocking Cancer Patient’s ‘Nazi Hair’
A segment on Wednesday night’s Full Frontal With Samantha Bee made fun of what seemed like a reasonably safe target — attendees at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference — but wound up really stepping in it. B-roll demonstrating an undercut favored by the Hitler Youth showed a young man who had shaved his head for his chemotherapy treatment for brain cancer.
In the traditional news package format (and the tone popularized by The Daily Show), the segment began with an introduction that compared attendees of this year’s CPAC with last year’s, which was mostly made up of Ted Cruz supporters and “chirpy little s***s with bow ties” who opposed Donald Trump.
“This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced by Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair,” the voice-over says, as clips of three different men with the “high and tight” cut were shown. Though the haircut has been in style for a while, the political connotation became unavoidable once neo-Nazis such as Richard Spencer adopted it.
The sister of one of the men in the segment, 20-year-old Kyle Coddington, saw the show and tweeted, “He actually has stage 4 brain cancer, but whatever floats your boat,” on Thursday morning.
When @iamsambee makes fun of your brother for having "Nazi hair." He actually has stage 4 brain cancer, but whatever floats your boat. pic.twitter.com/ULJC8nA3IX
— Megan Coddington (@meg_kelly16) March 9, 2017
According to his GoFundMe page, Coddington has stage IV glioblastoma. He had reportedly undergone chemo just before attending the conference and shaved his head very recently.
This is an offense that can happen when producing this style of comedic bit that depicts (and, frankly, mocks) real people. No one knows the backstory of how they came to be part of the group at whom we’re supposed to laugh.
But in a classy move, Bee made no excuses for her producers. She tweeted an apology shortly after this story came to light.
@meg_kelly16 We deeply apologize for offending you and @_that_kyle. We only learned of his condition today & have removed him from the piece
— Samantha Bee (@iamsambee) March 9, 2017
The show removed the “Nazi hair” clip from the introduction in online versions of the episode. And Mediaite discovered that Full Frontal then donated $1,000 to Coddington’s GoFundMe page. The silver lining to being made the butt of a joke on TV is that hundreds of people also visited the page on Thursday and donated money to fund Coddington’s treatment. As of this writing, he had raised $14,265, well over his $2,500 goal.
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