![]() And then loves herself for her bravery in admitting it. It's as if she hates herself for loving herself so much. In the movie, this performance is set within the story of a wildly narcissistic standup star called Sarah Silverman, who winds up ravishing her own reflection. Exhibit A is always Silverman herself: a lifelong depressive, adolescent bedwetter and, you suspect, a complicated person to be around. Indeed what Silverman shows us, over and over, is that people are usually much less tolerant than the rules they live within. If you can make jokes about your own people, this number seems to ask, why shouldn't you do it about others? Or another, I Love You More, which is a list of racial stereotypes: "I love you more than black people don't tip", "I love you more than Puerto Ricans need baths" and so on. "I want to be the first comic ever to shit on Martin Luther King," she says in this performance from her Jesus is Magic tour, before doing so actually rather gently.Īnd then there's her heroically blunt songs, such as You're Gonna Die Soon, performed to a group of octogenarians. The episode established her as the official scrutineer of liberal America's hypocrisies (many of which overlap with those of liberal Britain). ( This 1992 set is outrageously good for a 21-year-old.) But in many ways her big break did not come until 2001, when a furore ensued from a joke she made about "chinks" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Take an early and entirely typical gag from this show: "I was raped by a doctor," she confides, with all the seriousness those words deserve, "which is kind of bittersweet for a Jewish girl." It's not the Jewish stereotype that really powers the laugh, or the perfect inappropriateness of "bittersweet", it's the flip of mood from: "Here's something you can't joke about" to, "Oh yes you can." Dangerous – and liberating.įunny, how? Of course, jokes like this will offend some people. Yet very few perform it with the teasing intelligence of Silverman. The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas. ![]() Silverman has already demonstrated, amply, that she is willing to belittle anything. You could write a PhD about the tension in the pause that follows. The setup: "Obviously I don't want to belittle the events of 9/11," says Sarah Silverman, halfway through this show, three years after those events occurred. ![]()
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