“As a lesbian, I resent your laughter. And all laughter.”
– Sarah Silverman, in character as a lesbian wannabe on The Sarah Silverman Program
Somewhere in the spaces between the four words “I stubbed my vagina,” I fell in love with Sarah Silverman. I admire her wit so much that I want to have amusing little children with her – babies that emerge from her dented tunnel of life and love, mimicking their mother and saying, “I don’t want to be labeled as straight or labeled as gay, I just want people to look at me and see me, you know, as white” – and I don’t even like kids.
That’s how I feel about Sarah. And it’s a shame everyone doesn’t feel the same way.
Silverman, stand-up comic and star of Comedy Central’s new (and recently renewed) hit, The Sarah Silverman Program, does something that few comedians – male or female, gay or straight – dare attempt, and that few since Lenny Bruce have come close to doing well: Onstage she embodies bigotry, as well as society’s hypersensitivity to other important issues, just to expose the absurd aspects of them.
Sure, any comic can get laughs at the expense of others, but Silverman – who, by the way, is straight and in a relationship with late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel – wants more than just guffaws. She wants her audience to get the unfortunate truth behind her jokes – understand what they mean in the bigger picture, in a world that not only allows bigotry and hypocrisy to exist, but also far too often conforms to both. The thing is, she doesn’t make it easy.
“Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ,” she says on her 2005 DVD Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic. “And then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks. I hope the Jews did kill Christ. I’d do it again. I’d f—ing do it again in a second if I hear his Birkenstocks clacking this way.”
A dubious narrator, who consciously creates contrast, is what Silverman claims to be. When Jesus Is Magic was released in 2005, she told the New Yorker: ” People say I’m a nice girl saying terrible things. I tend to say the opposite of what I think. You hope that the absolute power of that transcends, and reaches the audience.”
Needless to say, Silverman’s message doesn’t always transcend the potency of her words. She’s a foul-mouthed ironist who blows a few minds when blowing her horn, and as a result, she has her share of critics who believe she embraces intolerance and is not a controversial voice against it, nor is she an unreliable narrator, but rather an unbalanced one.
Because Silverman, like most people with unconventional messages, preaches to a choir, it looks to some that her intention is moot or wasted on the open-minded. In the eyes of her critics, if her message isn’t affecting the bigots directly, all she’s really doing is telling tasteless and racist jokes. But what these folks fail to realize is that all anyone who speaks to a choir can hope for is that the choir will spread the message, and that it will eventually reach those most in need of it.
Besides, is it ever OK to shoot the messenger?
Those less critical of Silverman understand her intentions, but they can’t grant her a gold star for her methods, so they make excuses for her.
Some think that it’s only because she’s a woman she gets away with joking about abortion: “I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.” Others think that it’s only because she’s Jewish that she eludes the P.C. police when saying: “My nana was a survivor of the Holocaust. Oh, I’m sorry, the alleged holocaust.” And still others think that her appealing physique and Ivory-girl looks are what save her from being labeled “raunchy” when she resorts to scatological humor, as she does a little too often for my taste on The Sarah Silverman Program.
But it takes a lot more than ovaries, persecuted ancestors and a sexy veneer to reveal through humor the absurdity of the belief that an entire race of people can be blamed for anything, and that a woman who is pro-choice actually wants to have an abortion. It takes insight, wit and, in today’s ultra-sensitive climate, guts.
It also takes a very smart and fearless audience — one that realizes Silverman is brilliant in taking observational humor to a moralizing level, and that they’re not going to leave the theater unscathed.
Silverman makes her audiences work for what Jon Stewart would call their “moment of Zen.” She says the terrible things we’ve all heard and buries in between her one-liners all the things we’ve wanted to say in response, but didn’t have the guts or wit to voice. In other words, she sets the stage for the big “A-ha!” moments, but she forces us to figure out for ourselves the deeper nature of each situation. “Learn-medy” is what she facetiously calls it in Jesus Is Magic.
And it’s quite a lesson.
Like any good comedian who stretches the limits of an audience, Silverman is unpredictable, but unlike most of her peers, she’s uncomfortably unpredictable. And that, in great part, is due to the subjects of her jokes: the Holocaust, rape, racism, AIDS, sick children, etc. It’s also due to her unique delivery.
On stage, Silverman appears self-absorbed and distracted — not in the way that a busy person is sometimes distracted by thoughts of a hectic schedule, but like a deranged person is distracted by voices in her head. I’ve never seen a nervous terrorist strap a bomb to his waist, but I suspect it’s a lot like watching Silverman perform. One false move and …
But just when you think she might detonate — and with perfect diction go all Mel Gibson on everyone — she smells one of her armpits instead. And despite what her critics believe, that kind of control isn’t the mark of an insensitive or unbalanced person, but rather the calling card of someone perspicacious.
The magic of Jesus aside, the magic of Silverman is that she has her audiences laughing out loud and simultaneously wondering if laughing makes them horrible people.
Whether the feeling of discomfort people often report is sometimes actually guilt wouldn’t surprise anyone, and is something that each individual has to wrestle with herself. But one thing Silverman’s techniques reveal for sure is that she not only holds a key to our collective psyche, she also pokes us in the eyes with it — over and over again.
And then? She walks away, forcing us to either ignore the mess or heal ourselves.
When earlier this month on The Sarah Silverman Program her character, also named Sarah Silverman, decided after meeting a lesbian that she’s a lesbian herself, she latched onto almost every lesbian stereotype, right down to a mullet and an aggressive, possessive attitude. And not all lesbians were amused.
Her transformation from cute straight girl to uber-dyke was, I thought, hilarious, especially her musical performance at an open-mic night. But true to Silverman form, her final scene with the lesbian she pined for — played by out lesbian comedian and Silverman’s real-life friend Tig Notaro — was unexpected. Out of respect for those who haven’t seen the episode, I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that the typical girl meets girl, loses girl, gets girl formula isn’t used here. And some lesbian viewers were left feeling used, not supported.
But — and here’s the tricky part — that’s part of the deal.
When exposing the irrational on her show or in her act, Silverman almost always stings the very people she’s trying to champion. A chunk of pride is what she demands for a job well done. But some think it’s too high a price to pay and, as a result, doubt her intention.
Another (and, I think, the best) example of this is an incident that reportedly helped to inspire Jesus Is Magic: one man’s outcry over her use of the word “Chink” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2001.
Silverman joked about trying to get out of jury duty by writing something ridiculously biased on the court form. She related that a friend suggested that she write “I hate Chinks,” but not wanting to appear racist, she instead wrote, “I love Chinks.”
Silverman explained her decision to use the slur this way to the New Yorker: “Jew would be funny if I wasn’t Jewish. But it has to be offensive — it can’t be a self-deprecating thing. I needed the most offensive word I could use on television.”
Enter Guy Aoki of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. Aoki objected to the joke and shortly afterward debated Silverman on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Silverman argued, “It’s not a racist joke; it’s a joke about racism.” Then she called Aoki a “douche bag.”
Yeah, she’s not perfect.
But what’s most interesting about that incident — and even more telling about society’s tolerance of racism and Silverman’s intolerance of it — is that, according to Silverman, before the taping of Late Night she was told she could say “Spic,” but couldn’t say the Asian slur. That made no sense to her, so she said it anyway, and the network didn’t censor her.
The irony of that entire chain of events obviously escaped the network. It issued an apologized to Aoki, but not, as far as I know, to one Latino — but it didn’t escape Silverman. The woman apparently walks her talk.
Without a doubt, Sarah Silverman causes some collateral damage in her fight to broaden minds. But given the gravity of what she’s taking on, instead of overreacting when we think she crosses a line, maybe we should remember that she’s only crossing it to remind us of the bleakness there and that our apathy does nothing more than accommodate it.
