The character that Sarah Silverman plays on stage and television — also called Sarah Silverman — is girlish, sincere and eager to please, but also narcissistic, bigoted and, in Silverman’s words, “kind of an asshole.” There’s no topic on which she doesn’t believe she has something to contribute: race, the Holocaust, rape, gay rights and global poverty all fall victim to her mistaken belief that she is an exemplary concerned citizen. Take the AIDS crisis: “If we can put a man on the moon,” Silverman deadpans, as if embarking on a well-worn platitude, “we can put a man with AIDS on the moon. And someday, we can put everyone with AIDS on the moon.” She speaks earnestly, inviting you to empathize with the difficulties of being a good liberal in this day and age: “I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.”
It is several years now since the US release of Jesus Is Magic, the concert film that made Silverman’s name, but its jokes have lost none of their power to startle, forcing an audience to compute what she just said, whether she’s allowed to say it — and whether they’re allowed to laugh. “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans,” she says, shrugging her broad shoulders to imply that everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Then, suddenly serious: “I’m one of the few people that believes it was the blacks.”
The real Sarah Silverman, who is 37, lives in a big, bright apartment off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles with her dog, a Chihuahua-pug mix named Duck — “A stoned decision I’m stuck with.” She recently split from her boyfriend of five years, the TV host Jimmy Kimmel (although not, so far as we know, for the reasons you might infer from the song she performed on his show a few months back, I’m Fucking Matt Damon, which went on to win an Emmy). Journalists, especially male ones, often feel obliged to describe her beauty as “unconventional,” which as Silverman notes is usually just self-flattery on the journalist’s part: “They think they’re the only ones. It’s like, ‘You know what? I think she’s attractive!’ Like I’m a freaky choice or something.”
Her rising stardom has graced her with a personal assistant, a 23-year-old named James, whom she enjoys pretending to treat as a butler, snapping her fingers imperiously, though she still seems to be acclimatizing to the kind of lifestyle that involves a personal assistant. “Last week, I was trying so hard to find things for him to do,” she says when he steps outside, “I had to send him out to buy batteries and tennis balls.”
Some interesting cross-cultural chemistry seems guaranteed later this month, when Silverman arrives for her first solo performances in the UK: a country that prides itself on its appreciation of irony, playing host to the comedian who tests its outer limits more than any currently working. Silverman doesn’t plan on changing her act, which frequently mixes politically edgy stand-up with songs full of toilet humor. “I’m sheltered, so I don’t know what to expect,” she says, “but it’s weird when British comics come over here and their whole act is about ‘I’m different from you, I’m from another country!’ I’m just, like, whatever. Just tell jokes. I find you not as adorable as you think you are.”
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