Sarah Silverman stares at the camera with a pouting expression that is sarcastically earnest. She has a lesson: “Today I learned that old black women are wise beyond their years. And young black women…are prostitutes.” She lets the joke linger, she keeps pouting. She wants you to think she isn’t joking at all.
Silverman’s comedy trades in stinging political incorrectness, but not the equal-offense back-slapping that has made Carlos Mencia a household name. Her brand is much more vicious. Mind of Mencia secretly appeals to boorish stereotypes under the guise of “good fun” (apparently it’s not a minstrel show if you’re laughing at yourself). But Silverman, on her new Comedy Central series The Sarah Silverman Program, actually channels the hate and insecurity of a rich suburban white girl who thinks she’s better. That’s risky, but unlike Mencia’s middling caricature, it also has ideas.
Mencia pretends that racists don’t exist (maybe he knows they watch his show), whereas Silverman clearly recognizes that her comedy is informed by social disease. It’s funny in episode two when she takes in the neighborhood hobo and says she’s going to “turn him from a homeless person into a real person,” but it also looms alarmingly close to the real mindsets of people.
Whenever she offends, Silverman puts on a sweet smile—the technique of a spoiled little girl who wants a new toy. Clearly, she’s getting at something: Charming people can get away with believing very unkind things. Silverman gets away with unapologetically bawdy humor by virtue of her cute, blameless face, allowing critics to file it under feminism.
Silverman is anything but a feminist. She’s a realist, and the power of her humor lies in its ability to recognize hard truths about the way people treat each other even while it ruthlessly parodies them. Even when she’s offending no one in particular, Silverman has an uncanny sense of the absurd way people rationalize their actions. When the homeless man asks Silverman why she would want to take him into her home, she chooses society’s easy answer: “Hmm, I’m not a religious person, but God, probably.”
In small doses, Silverman’s stereotype-based humor can be bracing and thoughtful (she’s always a great roaster). But when her comedy is isolated and spread out over a season’s worth of sitcom material, she can also become dull and grating. She lacks the subtlety and imaginative wit that make Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm consistently hilarious. At her worst, Silverman predictably provides her character with the most crass response to a situation, even if it’s not especially funny. In those moments, Silverman reduces herself to a shock-value shtick.
Irony is Silverman’s stock-in-trade—a delicious cognitive dissonance between her dirty tongue and sweet countenance. But it’s a careful catwalk act: Like fellow comedian Dave Chappelle, Silverman uses stereotypes as fodder for jokes that try to distance themselves from the actual beliefs. She makes fun of the way we stereotype, not the stereotyped. Chappelle worried his show had become socially irresponsible, and no doubt similar attacks can be lobbed against Silverman, especially since Silverman is the naughty-nice white girl she makes fun of. We can assume she’s not a racist, but does that mean her racist jokes aren’t offensive? The lesson of The Sarah Silverman Program is that the best politically charged comedy makes us more aware of our own preposterous beliefs, even if it’s not always obvious what the jokes intend.