The Scotsman
When Sarah Silverman posed as a louche Amy Winehouse in Vanity Fair recently, few could have predicted that their kinship went beyond a glossy conglomeration of the world’s most controversial Jewish princesses.
But while Winehouse sparked widespread concern and incomprehension when a bizarre film she’d shot for her husband appeared on the internet featuring mice and Pete Doherty, Silverman was applauded for confessing to cheating on her boyfriend in “the bed, on the floor, on the towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the minibar …”, in a song subsequently exposed to You Tube and an audience currently approaching 10million views.
Of course, Silverman and her accomplice Matt Damon were only joking that she was “f**king Matt Damon” for the benefit of her beau, late-night chat host Jimmy Kimmel, celebrating his fifth anniversary show. With the Hollywood star gamely and repeatedly reiterating that yes, Silverman was indeed “f**king Matt Damon”, Kimmel responded gallantly with his own video announcing that he was “f**king Ben Affleck”, featuring, among others, Affleck, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Robin Williams, Meat Loaf and Harrison Ford.
If, as widely predicted, “I’m F**king Matt Damon” wins an Emmy next month, it will be something of a bittersweet irony, as less than a week before this interview was conducted, publicists confirmed that Silverman and Kimmel had split. Rather poignantly too, this weekend finally brings a UK cinematic release for Silverman’s breakthrough 2005 concert film, Jesus Is Magic, which takes its title from Silverman’s line about their relationship: “If my boyfriend, who’s a Catholic, and I ever have a kid, we’ll just be honest with it. We’ll say that Mommy is one of God’s chosen people and Daddy believes that Jesus is magic!”
“I still do some of those routines,” admits Silverman, taking a break from filming her second series of The Sarah Silverman Programme, the first of which aired in the UK on the Paramount Comedy Channel. “And I’ll play some of the songs on the road because it’s fun to do them again live. It’s hard because I’m working on my TV show all the time, so I’m not doing enough stand-up to have the amount of new stuff I should have. But we wrap in a week and I’m going to New York to focus on stand-up again.”
The new series, which like Jesus Is Magic features Silverman’s sister Laura in a perennially subordinate role to her sibling’s self-obsession – “that’s really fun, she has a lot more funny stuff this year” – also includes familiar faces from British screens, including Mighty Boosh collaborators Rich Fulcher and Matt Berry, who play “a minister” and “a representative of the dictionary”, and former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston as Dr Laser Rage, the hero of a DVD box set purchased by Sarah’s gay neighbour Brian.
Silverman is hoping to perform a few stand-up dates in the UK this autumn. Previously, her only visit to these shores was for Amnesty International’s 2006 Secret Policeman’s Ball, “which was so fun and exciting, everyone was so nice and I had a blast. I was mostly impressed by the audience, so many standing and the show lasted five hours. I went on about four hours in and everyone was still into it.”
An attractive, slim brunette with a swanlike neck that she describes as “one of the best of my many good features”, the 37-year-old projects a narcissistic, naïve persona that frees her to express the most politically incorrect material, her wide-eyed bigotry pushed to ludicrous extremes. She begins the film promising a show about the Holocaust and AIDS, goes on to throw in a callously throwaway line about 9/11, then a love song comparing her affection to black guys calling each other “n*gger” before a couple of alternately laughing and stony-faced African-Americans, eventually ending up in her dressing room, alone with her reflection, which she begins to kiss ravenously. Endearingly, she won’t dismiss the thrill of being described as “the world’s hottest, most controversial comedian”.
“It’s subjective,” she maintains. “I want to always try to let that stuff make me feel good, but I would never want to get too attached to it. No-one is hot or the most controversial forever, both of those things have expiration dates. I Googled myself a couple weeks ago and saw ‘Top Nine People That Should Host Saturday Night Live ... Sarah Silverman ...’ I was so flattered, clicked on it and it said: ‘if Sarah Silverman hosted SNL I'd punch myself in the face.’ Served me right.”
She wrote for the programme between 1993 and 1994 but was fired after one season, and for many in the UK, their introduction to her humour was the film The Aristocrats, where she accepted the challenge of trying to tell the most distasteful version of a vaudeville in-joke by claiming that she’d been raped by Joe Franklin, a veteran US showbiz turn. Franklin then threatened to sue, with the furore echoing her breakthrough appearance on the talk-show Late Night with Conan O’Brien, when her profile soared after a routine that turned on the word “chink”. She addresses that controversy in Jesus Is Magic¸ and if anything, exacerbates it.
“I try to make it a practice to never defend or try to explain my jokes,” she says. “It never ends well and definitely never ends funny. Sometimes people come up to me and say the most crude and disgusting things and I try to be gracious because I know they must think I like that stuff. To me there's a difference between surprising or honest or even graphic and just gross for gross’ sake – a very subtle, but very big difference. I'm not sure I’m smart enough to explain it, but like the hairy animal I am, I just feel it instinctively I guess.”
Ah yes, extraneous body hair. Silverman is blithely honest about her bodily functions and dysfunctions, confessing to bed-wetting till an advanced age and to being “extremely proud” that her ‘Poop Song’ is now hugely popular with kids. Her comedy career actually began in childhood under the tutelage of her social worker father.
“When I was three he taught me ‘bitch, bastard, damn, shit’” she recalls. “I would say it and grown-ups would die laughing and be so shocked. I saw then, at three, the positive reaction that came from that kind of verbal surprise and got addicted to that feeling. I just hope I find something funnier than poop before it all gets old. But does it ever get old?”
The youngest of four daughters, she looks up to a rabbi sister, “so good and loving and supportive, she loves me even though religion is not a part of my life, and I love her though religion is her life!”
Yet despite, or perhaps because of a teenage history of depression, she became a comic at 17, singing a song called ‘Mammaries’ in a restaurant. Her material “was about high school mostly, because I was in high school. It always seems to be about what’s mostly on my mind”. She dropped out of New York University at 19 and pursued stand-up in Greenwich Village. “When I was 19 I lost my virginity and my act became all about sex, then drugs and so on.”
Later, she started performing at the Boston Comedy Club, around the same time as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle.
“I would see Chris Rock all the time and I learned something really important from him,” she explains. “He was different then, delivery-wise. He would go up, start his jokes and if the crowd was talking and unsettled he would just keep going. If the crowd missed a joke or two, he seemed fine with it, because eventually, the whole crowd would be silent, hanging on his every word. He made the audience come to him. So often in that situation your instinct is to talk over them to make them listen. He never stooped to that.”
Silverman has routinely stooped to bit-parts in movies, invariably playing the best friend or bitchy girlfriend in films like There’s Something About Mary and School Of Rock, but that’s all in the past now.
“I'm really only interested in playing someone who is three-dimensional,” she states. “I feel finished with the ‘bitch’ or ‘sassy friend’ that exists only to provide exposition for the main girl character. I don't care about the size of a role, I'm done playing the band-aid for shitty writing.”
Exclusively attracted to funny men, she believes that ultimately, her gift to the world is “either laughter or herpes. Hopefully the former.”
