Silvermania!
The comedian talks about 'The Aristocrats,' being a New Hampshire Jew, and her hilarious first conce
By Andy Klein
For many of us who found last summer's The Aristocrats hysterical - and our numbers are, relatively speaking, legion, much to the confusion and disgust of, you know, other people - one of the great revelations (or at least one of the most discussed bits, probably the most discussed) was Sarah Silverman's unique riff on the dumb-but-funny joke upon which the whole film is based.
Curled up on a couch, looking seductive in an innocent, wide-eyed way, Silverman starts cheerily spinning an autobiographical version of the story, in which she and her family used to be the Aristocrats - an act that did all sorts of unspeakable and repulsive things on stage. The standard payoff to the joke is the revealing of the act's name ("What do you call yourself?" "The Aristocrats!"), which Silverman has already mentioned upfront; so, about halfway through her two minutes, she starts drifting off in a different direction, culminating in what must be the funniest punchline ever to contain the word "rape." I won't try to re-create it in any more detail, because 90 percent of what makes it effective is Silverman's delivery - a little gem of comic acting.
Even though she spent a year on Saturday Night Live early in her career ... and has been in a dozen or so features (There's Something About Mary, School of Rock) ... and has been a regular on Mr. Show and Greg the Bunny, that two-minute bit may have been her "big break."
"It's so crazy," Silverman - in town to promote her concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, opening this week - tells me. "Of all the things I've done, this was literally 15 minutes at my apartment, in the shirt I woke up in, and the skirt I throw on to walk my dog in, with no makeup. It never occurred to me they would even - no offense to those guys - edit this thing together. You know, you do so many of these things for your friends ... . But it's funny that that's, like, my big breakout. I didn't ever remember what I said when I saw the movie ... . You can see that when I start talking, I have no idea what I'm about to say."
In fact, her performance is so perfectly modulated that I had assumed that she did know what she was going to say, that she had carefully worked it out in advance. But she insists that it was one take, and she was "100 percent winging it."
Silverman grew up in New Hampshire, where Jews are, to put it mildly, not commonplace. There are roughly 10,000 Jews in a population of a million and a quarter, putting the state ahead of Montana and Mississippi by percentage, but behind most of the Northeast. (Actually, a quick Googling reveals that New Hampshire is the 24th most Jewish state. In the top half! Who knew?)
Top half or not, there is something demographically weird about the fact that there have been three New Hampshire Jews - Silverman, Adam Sandler, and Seth Meyers - among the hundred or so regular cast members of SNL. But the Silvermans weren't very religious: "We went to synagogue once, maybe twice a year, and my dad let us bring a book to put inside the prayer book to read."
Of course, she does come from a showbiz family ... of a sort. Her dad - owner of Crazy Sophie's Factory Outlet - did his own commercials on the radio: "I'm Crazy Donald," Silverman mimics, "Crazy Sophie's husband, and, when I see the prices at the mall, I just want to vomit! So, if you care enough to buy the very best, but you're too cheap, come to Crazy Sophie's!" Her mom was the voice of the local movie theater showtimes line, so Silverman grew up with her being in a little room filled with popcorn, saying, "Thank you for calling Bedford Mall Cinemas 1, 2, 3, and 4, where all bargain matinees are only two dollars, Monday through Saturday."
The real adjustment was when she left New Hampshire for New York to attend NYU. She'd be telling her roommate something like, "Yeah, I have to go back to New Hampshire next week," then reflexively elaborating with "It's this holiday ... called Passover ... where - " when the roommate would interrupt and say, "Sarah, you don't have to explain what Passover is."
Her recent notoriety from The Aristocrats should help the fortuitously timed release of Jesus Is Magic, and new converts will likely be very happy with what they see. Her material here pushes - rips, even - the envelope every bit as much as The Aristocrats, without ever reaching its heights (or depths) of grossness.
In the course of 72 minutes, Silverman touches on concentration camps, AIDS, 9/11, even her dead grandmother's bodily orifices. It's hard to imagine any topic she couldn't find something funny in.
When I ask her if there are any lines she draws, she tells me, "Only in terms of funniness: nothing's off limits if it's funny enough ... to me at least, since it is of course subjective. But everything's off limits if it's not; if it's not funny enough, it's offensive."
She never defends her material, because it's all so subjective. Everything's going to hurt somebody. And everybody has something that hurts. "I'm sure if I had just been raped, and I went to a comedy club and saw a joke trivializing rape, it probably would be upsetting to me. Everyone's looking at comedy from the context of their own experience, and there's no way to control that, you know." She's learned to accept that some people won't like some material, and there's no point in trying to argue them into liking it. "I mean, it's already narcissistic enough to be a standup, but to expect everyone to like you is absurd."
I ask her if her parents ever freak about her act, what with references to anal sex and blow jobs and the aforementioned grandma's bodily orifices. "No, my dad has no problem with it ... which is almost disgusting. And my mom: She really likes it, but every once in a while she'll be like, 'I have a very visual mind.'"
Jesus Is Magic is based on a show that Silverman first did at a club in 2001 and then took to the stage a year later. The movie, directed by Liam Lynch, is predominantly drawn from two Los Angeles performances on September 23-24 of last year. Lynch "opens it up" with a backstage framing device, in which Silverman plays herself as an intolerable diva, and four external musical numbers - such Silverman songs as "You're Gonna Die Soon" and "Porn Stars" - as well as a ... unique ... version of "Amazing Grace."
The whole thing is never less than amusing and more often utterly hilarious. Normally I'm relieved to see such a short running time on concert films, which often overstay their welcome; but in this case I would have eagerly watched another half hour.
Published: 11/10/2005
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