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| February 2, 2007 |
| Sarah Silverman's appealing, appalling character |
NEW YORK (AP) -- Fans of Sarah Silverman will quickly recognize the character she plays on her new Comedy Central series. To start with, the character is called Sarah. Furthermore, this particular Sarah continues the tradition of winsome depravity long embraced by the humorist-actress who shares her name.
During years of standup comedy, TV appearances and film roles, Silverman has mined laughs from 9/11, AIDS, the Holocaust, rape and Martin Luther King, among other topics that most comics leave safely buried.
Now "The Sarah Silverman Program" (premiering Thursday at 10:30 p.m. EST) gives a fresh twist to her freewheeling wrongness in the person of a flighty, self-consumed slacker. Sarah's response to a lengthy TV benefit for children with leukemia? She rousts herself from the couch to go buy fresh batteries for her remote ... so she can change the channel.
A farting contest with her friends has an unfortunate outcome for Sarah. Subsequently granted any wish by God, she requests ... a better fart. On this week's episode, Sarah gets drunk on cough syrup and crashes her car into a playground. But not before snubbing an elderly woman at the drug store for looking old ... just moments after praising the woman's youthful appearance.
This is the sort of mindbending behavior Sarah makes a practice of, inflicting whiplash on anyone who crosses her path -- including the audience.
"I don't think anybody's gonna say, 'Oh, she's a good person,' " Silverman acknowledges with a smile. But the funny, often shocking thing about Silverman's show is: You are drawn to the character, however appalling, even as she pushes you away with a rude shove.
This is Silverman's specialty. After all, she is the comic who in her standup act tells the crowd, "I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin." Silverman's comedy has always been based on saying the opposite of what she feels, in the service of exposing buried truths about prejudice, pettiness or sundry other wrong-headed attitudes.
Then again, maybe not. "I don't know if it's like: Hey, we're all thinking this, and now I'm saying it," she muses. |
posted by viraks @ 5:02:00 AM  |
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