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Oliver Burkeman www.theguardian.com
<p>On the eve of her first British comedy gig, US TV star Sarah Silverman talks to <strong>Oliver Burkeman</strong></p>
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the Guardian
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 empathise 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 acclimatising 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 in Britain for her first solo performances here: 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 humour. "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."

When we meet, Silverman is absorbed in a different project: a short video (now available online) that aims to garner votes for Barack Obama in Florida by persuading her young, Jewish, Democrat-supporting fans to lobby their elderly Floridian Jewish relatives, an especially difficult demographic for Obama. The video rehashes a vintage Silverman skit in which she explains why, far from being at odds with each other, young black American men and elderly Jews should embrace their commonalities. "They may seem totally different, but on paper they're the same," she says, sitting on a sofa in her apartment between a Young Black Man and an Elderly Jewish Woman. "I mean, think about it. Tracksuits - let's start there... Car of choice, the Cadillac. They're both crazy about their grandkids... They both say 'yo' all the time, though Jews go right to left, 'oy'. What else? Oh: all of their friends are dying." It's a typically brain-twisting Silverman exercise, playing with the spectres of racism and antisemitism, in a video funded by the Jewish Council for Education and Research in support of an African-American candidate.

Silverman's humour has been well characterised, in the online magazine Slate, as "meta-bigotry" - the same approach adopted by the creators of South Park and by Sacha Baron Cohen on a good day. As a stand-up and in her TV show, the Sarah Silverman Program, she parodies the ways that we - bigots and self-styled liberal non-bigots alike - discuss taboo topics, or avoid discussing them, or tie ourselves in logical knots in order to hold what we think are the correct opinions about them. This is edgy in the truest sense of the term, but Silverman's blank-faced persona, of course, doesn't think she's being edgy except at those moments when she really isn't. "Nazis are a-holes, and I'll be the first to admit it, because I'm edgy," she says in Jesus Is Magic. "But they're cute when they're little - I will give them that."

The biggest risk involved in being a meta-bigot is that people will think you're secretly a real bigot, wrapping your hatred in a protective blanket of irony. Some people do think this about Silverman. But the criticism that seems to have stung the most came from the New York Times writer AO Scott, who called her act "the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right. She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity... Naughty as she may seem, she's playing safe." ("That was something that always festered in the back of my mind that I never talked about," Silverman has said.)

But a good Silverman routine should still make her typical audience - white, liberal - feel uncomfortable, not least because of the way her glib homilies seem to echo those to which we're prone, even though their content is the precise opposite. A typical one-liner begins as if it's a pro-diversity cliché, then swerves sharply in another direction: "I learned that whether you're gay, bisexual - it doesn't matter," she says brightly, cocking her head. "Because at the end of the day... they're both gross."

Silverman was born and raised in New Hampshire, the youngest of four sisters, in a family that by virtue of being Jewish and liberal was almost unique. "It was a very conservative area," she recalls. "Very white-blonde, very preppy, hoity-toity. Ever since I was little, people would ask, 'Are you from New York?' and I'd say, 'I'm from here!' I felt like a stranger in a strange land." She was "hairy and dark", and used humour at school to deflect insults about her "monkey legs". But she attributes her earliest performative leanings to her father, Donald, who owned a clothes shop called Crazy Sophie's Factory Outlet, for which he recorded his own local radio ads. ("Spend your time at the mall - spend your money at Crazy Sophie's!") When she was three, he taught her to say "bitchbastarddamnshit". "He thought it was hilarious," she says. "I would say them for his friends, and all these adults would go crazy laughing. And they were laughing at pure shock value - a tiny child saying filthy words. It became very addictive for me. I chased that excellent feeling, even from that age."

Before she was born, her parents had had a son, who died in an accident while in the care of her grandmother; they told Sarah about him when she turned five. "Every Sunday my grandmother would pick us up in the car and we'd go to a diner for lunch," Silverman remembers. "The Sunday just after I'd learned about Jeffrey, we got in the car, and she goes, 'Everybody put your seatbelt on!' And I go, 'Yeah... because we don't want to wind up like Jeffrey!'

"I thought that would kill," she recalls, shaking her head. "I remember bursting with excitement to say it. And she just started sobbing. God, my poor Nana. But up until then I had learned that saying the worst possible thing was funny, you know?"

Her parents divorced when she was six. "It was the happiest day of my life. I remember my sisters crying and saying, 'She doesn't understand.' I was sad, too, but I was sad because I'd learned a dance, and nobody was watching. I remember thinking, 'I don't understand? They're moving away from each other! I couldn't be happier.' Every single night was screaming. I look back on it even now, and I totally got it. I was happy." By her early teens, though, she had become deeply depressed, and a chronic bedwetter. (She was dispatched to see a local psychiatrist. At their first appointment, he prescribed Xanax; when she arrived for her second appointment, it turned out that he'd hanged himself.) The cloud lifted only after she arrived in New York, aged 18. "I remember describing my depression to my stepdad, and saying, 'I feel like I'm homesick, but I'm home.' And then I arrived in New York, and I swear, the day I moved there, it felt like I was home. I felt like I was a bear who'd been raised in the, in the..." She trails off. "I don't know. I don't know where bears aren't raised. But you see what I mean."

Silverman didn't last long at New York University: she was spending every evening handing out flyers for comedy clubs in exchange for time on stage, and would often fall asleep during lectures; she soon quit to pursue comedy full-time. In footage of her early shows, she can be seen mocking the clichés of live stand-up - "I like having sex! Are there any sex people here tonight?" - and exploring the humorous potential of her Jewishness: "My sister's getting married, and they're taking each other's names, so she'll be Susan Silverman-Abramowitz. But they're thinking of shortening it to just 'Jews'."

By 22, she'd been hired as a writer on Saturday Night Live, any trainee American comedian's dream job. She was fired almost immediately. SNL at the time wasn't welcoming to women, nor to comedians with a distinctive voice who couldn't write for a variety of characters. Besides, one imagines NBC executives blanching at some of Silverman's jokes, such as this line, about a law requiring women seeking an abortion to wait 24 hours to consider their decision: "I think it's a good law. I was going to get an abortion the other day. I totally wanted an abortion, and it turns out I was just thirsty."

Then, in 2001, after various small roles in film and TV, she made an appearance on Conan O'Brien's late-night talkshow that has since become notorious. During the interview, Silverman recounted being summoned for jury service and wanting to find a way to get out of it. "So my friend said, why don't you write something really racist on the form, like, 'I hate chinks'? Yeah, but you know, I don't want people to think I'm racist - I just want to get out of jury duty. So I filled out the form and I wrote" - at this point she beamed, smugly - " 'I love chinks.'" As O'Brien buried his head in his hands, Silverman added: "And who doesn't?"

This joke is, of course, not racist, but about racism: the humour is in Silverman's apparent belief that changing the word "hate" to "love" acquits her of bigotry. Still, one could argue that "chinks" is an easier word for Silverman to use than for people of Chinese heritage to have to hear, and it provoked a furious attack from Guy Aoki, the president of a lobby group called Media Action Network for Asian-Americans. The resultant furore culminated in a disastrous joint appearance by Silverman and Aoki on the talkshow Politically Incorrect, in which Silverman tried to defend the joke before losing her cool and calling Aoki a "douchebag".

She says the experience taught her never to try to defend her humour. "It's so subjective, comedy," she says now. "If you don't find something funny, it can easily be truly offensive, so I usually just say I'm really sorry." (Notably, she declined to apologise for another infamous appearance, in the 2005 documentary film The Aristocrats, in which her comic turn ends by straightfacedly accusing a real, much-loved American TV personality of rape.) In her stand-up act, she says that the "chinks" affair taught her another lesson: she learned that racism is bad. "And I mean bad, like in that black way."

Silverman's humour, which works so well when her topic is the way in which we discuss relations between social groups, only really fails when her targets are individuals: then, it can seem cruel. "Wow, she's amazing," Silverman said of Britney Spears at the 2007 MTV Music Video Awards at which the troubled singer tried to stage a comeback. "I mean, she's 25 years old and she's already accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in her life. It's mind-blowing." At another MTV event, days before Paris Hilton was due to go to jail, Silverman drew loud cackles from the audience with a lewd joke at her expense. Hilton, who was in the audience, looked frozen and mortified; unexpectedly, you found yourself feeling sorry for her.

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 humour 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 humour 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 humour 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!"

Sarah Silverman appears at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on October 19. Series 1 of The Sarah Silverman Program will be screened on Paramount Comedy 1 from October 20-24. Jesus Is Magic is out on DVD on October 13.