november / december 2005:

WINTER MOVIE PREVIEW: SARAH SILVERMAN
She's funny and uncouth, thinks Jesus is Magic, and is coming to a theatre near you.

profiles by Benyamin Cohen & Bradford R. Pilcher


Nazis are a---holes.”

That’s Sarah Silverman appearing on HBO not too long ago. The no-holds-barred comedienne is famous for her sardonic riffs on taboo topics like racism and Jesus. But this was unchartered territory even for Silverman. Appearing on a political roundtable, she had just spent five minutes going off on how Hitler only killed six million Jews. Yes, you read that right. And that led to the comment about the Nazis.

“Nazis are a---holes,” she repeats for added effect. “They’re cute when they’re little. Why can’t they just stay small?” Her smile disappears. “But the Holocaust isn’t always funny. And I will tell you something that I truly believe: That if black people were in Germany during World War II, the Holocaust would have never happened.” She pauses. “Or, not to Jews...”

It’s this type of off-kilter dry wit that has garnered the 34-year-old Silverman cult status among her legions of fans. With her girl-next-door looks and witty personality, she’s the beautiful Jewish girl your mom always wanted you to marry. You just might want to tell Silverman to keep her thoughts to herself when she meets the folks.

Who is she, you ask? Believe us, you’ve seen her. She’s been on everything from Seinfeld to the The Larry Sanders Show and is a staple on just about any show on Comedy Central. And she’s no stranger to the big screen. She’s played bit parts in more than 25 films in the last eight years alone (There’s Something About Mary, School of Rock, and this summer’s comedy crassfest The Aristocrats just to name a few.)

Read all the winter movie profiles: Sarah Silverman Steven Spielberg Jack Black Amanda Peet Zach Braff Jon Favreau Mel Brooks

And this winter, it seems the sardonic Silverman will be in every multiplex across America, appearing in three films -- the film adaptation of Broadway’s Rent, the romantic comedy I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, and finally breaking out in her very own comedy concert film Jesus is Magic. The film, directed by Liam Lynch, comprises Silverman’s performance before a live audience interwoven with stylish musical numbers and backstage intrigue.

Everything and nothing is sacred in Silverman’s sharp, frequently shocking but always astute comedic oeuvre, from her casual, self-deprecating barbs about ethnicity and sexuality (“I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl,”), to hot-button racial jokes (“The best time to have a baby is when you’re a black teenager”) and right down the line to such taboo-shattering targets as the Holocaust (“My grandmother was in one of the better camps”), subjects that most people wouldn’t dare address, even under the guise of comedy.

Not even the events of September 11th, as reconsidered through Silverman’s beaming on-stage grin, are immune to the performer’s limitless arsenal of topics. Indeed, this subject illuminates precisely what makes her such an unparalleled success. It’s her ability to take something tragic, controversial or politically incorrect and lend it a positive spin. Enhanced by a carefully modulated delivery, her jokes come across as innocent, naïve, and almost childlike.

After watching tapes of her performances, viewers will realize that it’s her pauses that make her act. She speaks of the most taboo topics and just when you think she won’t take it any further, she pauses. It’s her signature move. Always after the pause, comes the punch line. Take this example: “So there I was licking jelly off my boyfriend.” Pause. “And I thought: Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother!”

Sure, it doesn’t hurt that Silverman is sexy and unafraid of that fact, making her something of an improbable pin-up among the Maxim magazine set. “Sarah is more woman than your girlfriend and more of a dude than your guy friends,” explains Lynch. “She goes in and out of being a princess and a truck driver while flirtatiously pressing your every button and shocking you. She’s blatant about sex and race and mixes these topics with a self-centered charm that often forces people to relate to themselves in reaction to not relating to Sarah. She mixes the sweet with the bitter, making fun of racists, perverts, the materialistic, the two-faced and the self-centered — by acting like them all herself. Oddly enough, if any of these things bother you, then you’ll love Sarah’s work all the more.”

Because Silverman is so candid and unsparing about her own ethnicity and sexuality, she manages to help her audience see laughter in what might ordinarily be presumed as off limits. By blending the personal with the political, and knowing how to contextualize her comic land mines, Silverman succeeds in doing what very few contemporary comics since Lenny Bruce have been able to do — laugh at anything and everything without guilt and the fear of repercussion. “People need to feel like they’re not being attacked,” Silverman admits. “Like they’re in a safe space where no punches are being pulled.”

For Silverman, film is not the end all be all. She’s just waiting patiently for television to figure out how to smoothly package her razor-sharp talent. A few years ago, while appearing on Conan O’Brien’s show, one of her jokes used a familiar slur referring to Asians. NBC issued an apology while her fellow comedians rushed to her defense.

Until the networks come to their senses and recognize this untapped talent, she appears intermittently on half a dozen Comedy Central shows from Crank Yankers to the Friar’s Club Roast. As well, for the last several years she’s been dating the poster boy for Comedy Central and ABC’s king of late night, Jimmy Kimmel.

Like many comedians, Silverman figured out early what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. “I learned very early on that being funny was a great way to get attention,” she says. “It was also a way to have a feeling of control. I was lucky I was funny, or I’d probably get an eating disorder or some other version of control-issues.”

Despite the fact that much of her material is Jewish-based, she had a surprisingly religiously ambiguous upbringing. “We lived in a mostly Christian town and knew very few Jews outside our own family,” she says. “None of us were Bat Mitzvahed, and we only went to temple once or maybe twice a year. Our Dad let us bring a book to hide inside the Torah. That’s what he did, too.”

Since Hitler and Jesus are always fodder for Silverman’s risqué sense of humor, she’s almost always referred to as “Sarah Silverman, the Jewish comedienne.” But she accepts the title begrudgingly. “I guess I just don’t feel like that should be what defines me as a comic,” she says. “I’m never just a comic, it’s always a Jewish comedienne; it’s so gay. I like being Jewish and I like being a woman, but it’s not all I am.” Pause. “Also, everybody hates the Jews.”

Don’t get her wrong. Silverman doesn’t shy away from the label — she just doesn’t think it’s appropriate. “I am proud to be Jewish, but to be labeled a Jewish comedian is like referring to Bill Cosby as ‘the black comedian, Bill Cosby,’ or like referring to me as ‘sister’ or ‘daughter comedian, Sarah Silverman.’ I am proud to be my sibling’s sister, and my parents’ daughter, and that’s a big part of my life and identity as well, but it is not all what should define me. Even in my comedy life — if I only or mostly did jokes about being Jewish, then that would be my angle, but I talk about black people being black and Chinese people being Chinese and me being Jewish. I also talk about my niece and AIDS and all the things that make up the world around me.”

That niece belongs to her sister, a feminist rabbi who penned Jewish Family & Life: Traditions, Holidays, and Values for Today’s Parents and Children along with her husband, Jewish Internet magnate Yossi Abramowitz.

Being an aunt has not only given Silverman new material, but it has also given her goals for the future. “I hope to continue growing and learning. Maybe my opinions on things will have changed — and having that inform my material as a stand up. I don’t want to be doing the same stuff. I want to continue acting and writing. And I want to still be in love and keeping it new everyday. Maybe have a kid or two — strictly for the new material it would garner, of course.”

But, for now, motherhood and marriage is still in the distance. That’s probably a good thing since Silverman has become somewhat of a sex symbol, appearing in the pages of men’s magazines like Esquire and Playboy (with her clothes on) as an object of desire. “I don’t mind people thinking I’m attractive. Not at all! I want to appreciate it while it’s here,” she says. “One time I passed some construction workers on the street and one of them whistled. I turned back to him with disgust and he said, ‘Not you!’ The whistle was for the woman in front of me. From then on I appreciated the stuff aimed at me.”

In response to incidents like that, does she use her stand-up routine as a cathartic experience, a way for her to vent out her own insecurities and weaknesses? Silverman wryly replies. “It would if I was an insecure weakling.” Pause. “But I’m #1.”



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