Sarah Silverman Says Some of Her Early Comedy ‘Doesn’t Hold Up’
Sarah Silverman doesn’t do “Sarah Silverman” anymore.
The “ignorant arrogant” character from her early stand-up and, notably, from Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program has been slowly phased out over time, the comic told David Duchovny on the latest episode of his Fail Better podcast. “It wasn't really a conscious, ‘Hey, that stuff doesn’t work, so Im going to go a different way,’” she explained. “I think I just very naturally started changing.”
“My first comedy special, Jesus Is Magic, is like, ‘I’m Sarah Silverman, but I’m totally doing a character,'” she said.
It was always a tough balancing act — making fun of clueless racism and other ignorance by taking on the persona herself. One particular example that hasn’t aged well is the blackface bit she did on her Comedy Central show. Silverman’s intention may have been to show that her offensive character was outrageously stupid and unforgivable, but getting laughs with blackface is still getting laughs with blackface. “In some ways, the stuff I did doesn’t hold up because it comes from a white privilege,” she acknowledged.
One reason for the evolution away from her “ignorant arrogant” character was the political ascendence of Donald Trump. “Having Trump win … and how the world changed in that way, that character was no longer really amusing to me, because he embodies that completely,” she told Duchovny.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, the audience isn’t laughing at my racist jokes anymore,’” she continued. “It is art, you know? And just like a painting on a wall in a museum, if you go and see it every single day, it changes because your life changes, your experiences change, and the world around us completely changes. And so what you’re seeing is going to be inferred with a whole new set of perspectives.”
For instance, Silverman recently watched the “We Are the World” documentary that featured Prince winning an American Music Award for Best Black Artist. “I was stunned that was an award and stunned that I’m sure I watched it (in 1984) and thought nothing of it,” she said. “And if anything, thought it was inclusive. Of course, that’s absurd. It just goes to show that as much as we think we have progressed and as woke as we are in this current moment, we’re going to look back and go, ‘Oh my God, we had Best Actress and Best Actor awards,’ you know, whatever. We’ll see things in a whole new way that we don’t see right now.”
We don’t know what we don’t know, Silverman believes now. We have to learn from the past and be changed by the past “but to litigate the past is, to me, a less successful plight. Even though it’s embarrassing looking back, the only thing really to be embarrassed about is if we don’t change from it.”