Silverman seems uninterested in exploring what it means to be a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated business. Early last year, when the journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Vanity Fair entitled Why Women Aren’t Funny, Silverman was endlessly pestered to write a rebuttal. In fact, the Hitchens article didn’t live up to its title — it merely speculated about why men more often use humor to attract women than vice versa — and Silverman didn’t disagree with it. “Snore,” she says today, when the topic arises. “That article was just saying that in general, men who are not necessarily attractive, as a survival skill, use humor to get girls. And for women it is not that way. There are other things you do to get men that are very superficial, very materialistic — and that says more about men than it does about women. The reason there are lots of funny women is because of other survival skills they’ve had to develop, whether because they’re fat or they’re hairy or they’ve had a rough life, and they have to create this shell of a sense of humor in order to survive through it.”
Make no mistake: Sarah Silverman does not want any of your labels. “People are always introducing me as ‘Sarah Silverman, Jewish comedian,’” she says at one point during her stage act. “I hate that! I wish people would see me for who I really am. I’m white!”
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