The Sassafras of Sarah Silverman

Yes, it’s true, Sarah Silverman (b. 1970) has the same birthday as Woody Allen, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, and Dick Shawn. Did she just decide to become a combination of all of them? She kind of is. She has another major synchronicity with yet another comedian: like Adam Sandler she is a Generation X Jew from New Hampshire! That’s a very exclusive club! And though they’re very different kinds of comedians, that description of them actually very much informs both of their identities.

Here comparisons must cease however because the entire point of Sarah Silverman is that she’s unique and unprecedented. She came on the scene in the ’90s and rapidly established a reputation for being outrageously plain-spoken in a way that was novel. There had certainly been bawdy comediennes in the past, but it was new for one to also be both 1) political and 2) attractive. This trifecta of qualities is, in a word, threatening to a lot of people, but the ’90s (the age of the Riot Grrrl) were the right time for a woman to punch through.

To be fair, others did too (Janeane Garofolo springs immediately to mind) but there’s something about Silverman that somehow short-circuited the knee-jerk resistance of jerky males to women in comedy. Garofolo, for example, is kind of like the Hillary of comedy. She is directly confrontational, making it easy for dude-bros to put her in a box and keep her there. Silverman is artful and indirect. Her natural tools are irony and sarcasm and exaggeration and shock and satire. She often proposes appalling things that make you guffaw. It’s as though she momentarily puts on an Archie Bunker hat. It allows people with a brain in their heads to contemplate the wrongness of the premise and think about things a little. Meanwhile, the cheap seats are still on board to applaud her (forgive me) balls.

The technique of comic indirectness is not exclusive to any one section of humanity. On the one hand it’s traditionally associated with oppressed minorities who have to be clever and sophisticated in their messaging in order to outsmart the power structure. But on the other hand some of the satirical geniuses of the English speaking world (Swift,Pope, etc) have been PART of the power structure, attacking it from within. I do know that it forms a huge part of my own generation’s (X) philosophical outlook. And a generation gap has been steadily forming over the last several years about allowable speech. Generation X tends to get caught in the middle. On the whole, I would say we share the progressive goals of younger generations, i.e., that elusive bugbear known as “Wokeness” a term that is now used pejoratively by the Cro-Magnon faction. On the other hand, Gen X is all about that ironic voice. And the younger generations seem so bent on policing speech that they seem blind and deaf to those comic techniques I mentioned, and seem to want them silenced just as much as outright hate speech in spite of the intent that lies beneath. This is not uniformly the case, but one certainly encounters anecdotal reports of this. And now many comedians increasingly find themselves as much at odds with the left as the right. It’s probably how it’s meant to be, anyway, but it is a bit disorienting. Silverman doesn’t particularly represent this predicament, btw, to the exclusive of others, but let’s just say that she is no stranger to controversy. And to her credit, she typically greets such kerfuffles with a shit-eating grin.

After a brief stint at NYU, she was hired (and quickly fired) by Saturday Night Live (1992-93). She then went on to be a regular cast member on Mr. Show with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross from 1995 to 1997 and to make her Letterman debut in 1997. From here she went into constant circulation on talk/variety shows, and guest shots on sit-coms and other TV programs. She had supporting parts in movies like There’s Something About Mary (1998), Evolution (2001) and School of Rock (2003). In 2005 her breakthrough concert film Jesus is Magic raised her profile considerably. And then she got her own sketch variety show The Sarah Silverman Program (2007-2010) on Comedy Central. And a ton of stuff since then, including some new controversy practically every few months. As it should be!

She has a big supporting role in the upcoming Leonard Bernstein bio-pic Maestro (2023). I very much enjoyed her new Netflix special Someone You Love, and was delighted to hear her mention her boyfriend many times. Delighted because I know him! Rory Albanese is the former of showrunner of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and is currently a producer on Jimmy Kimmel Live! He reached out to me when No Applause first came out and we lunched and talked about vaudeville, of course. (Silverman’s previous entanglement include Kimmel himself and Michael Sheen).

For more on show biz history,please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and keep an eye out for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.