The Joke's On Us

[This article is reprinted from The American Prospect.]

Nothing is sacred for comedian Sarah Silverman, especially not herself. In her performances, her persona is a big, dirty joke, defilement made manifest -- she's a squeaky-clean girl who says the vilest things. Her first feature, Jesus Is Magic, pads out footage of her one-woman concert with skits of the most sordid imaginings: Sarah as Jewish porn-starlet ("Fuck my tuchus!"), Sarah as rock-star bully at a nursing home ("You're gonna die soon!"). But none of these characters compare to her concert "self," a nice, Jewish girl who tries to conceal her racist narcissism with PC platitudes ... but terrible thoughts keep tumbling out.

Silverman is the deconstructionist as comic -- if Derrida had held court, she would have been his jester. Her comedy is disturbingly decentered, full of strange shifts and currents. She dawdles with the punch line, stretches out syllables until they are almost meaningless, slips a bit of ick into a parenthetical aside. She plays with the tension between her projected persona -- a coddled and completely self-absorbed Jewish-American Princess -- and what her audience assumes is her real self. But she never quite reveals that real self or the meaning behind the monstrous things she says on stage. Is she a racist or not? She sidesteps the question entirely: "I don't care if you think I'm a racist," she says in Jesus. "I just want you to think I'm thin."

Silverman doesn't subvert racial, sexual, or class-based stereotypes, she exploits them. In Jesus, she makes jokes about, among other things, the Holocaust ("My Nana had a vanity number ... it said BEDAZZLED"), AIDS, pregnancy rates among black teens, and the way Mexican people smell. Her offerings on race belong to that breed of comedy found in the work of Dave Chappelle and the cleverer bits of In Living Color -- racist-seeming jokes about racism, or its PC-cloaked corollary, anti-racist hypocrisy.

"I once dated a guy who was half-black," she says, as proof she's a nice, progressive person. "Oh my God ... I'm such a pessimist ... he's half-white."

Silverman is at once less and more daring than she seems to be. The comedian kicked up a storm when she used the word "chink" in a routine on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2001. She described wanting to get out of jury duty by writing something offensive on the candidate form. A friend suggested, "I hate chinks." Not wanting to be so racist, she claimed, she wrote, "I love chinks."

Guy Aoki, the head of an Asian-American watchdog group, launched a protest that resulted in a network apology and a debate between Aoki and Silverman on the Bill Maher's show Real Time. Silverman discusses the incident in Jesus, letting the deadpan slip for an instant ("It was in the context of a joke. Obviously.") before she serves up the following:

"As a Jew -- as a member of the Jewish community -- I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media. Right? What kind of a world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can't say 'chink' on network television? It's like the fifties. It's scary."

As someone who is part Chinese, I could be considered a chink -- I've certainly had that word directed toward me with unmistakable malice. And because I've heard the word in its fully nasty glory, I didn't find Silverman's joke particularly offensive. I understood that she was lampooning bigotry and the fake sensitivity used to try to cover it. All the same, I felt a twinge of discomfort. Although she's often billed as a shock comic, Silverman's humor panders to her audience a bit, because it relies on a certain assumption: "I'm not racist because I joke (or laugh) about racism, or its PC-cloaked counterpart. Because I say everything you secretly think."