Sarah Silverman is a truly horrible person.
No, not Sarah Silverman the stand-up comedian and actress; she's smart, funny, and gosh darn cute. I mean Sarah Silverman, the protagonist of The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central. She's just awful, although admittedly also gosh darn cute.
In The Sarah Silverman Program, Sarah Silverman plays Sarah Silverman, the world's most self-involved person. During a public service announcement about starving children, Sarah discovers that her television remote won't work. She pastes all her money on the screen so she won't have to look at them, then goes out to buy new batteries, stopping to tell a homeless person how difficult her life is. Sarah poses as the mother of a young girl so she can enter a beauty pageant, but distraught over her own loss of the same pageant years ago, she winds up grabbing the crown and marching down the runway herself.
It's not that Sarah is malicious - at one point she decides to prove she's a caring person by letting a homeless man move in with her (although she won't feed him because she doesn't want to enable him) - Sarah just has a childlike focus on herself. This naivete is what makes the character work; if she seemed smart and self aware then she'd be a monster, but instead she comes off as likably idiotic.
Episodes often verge on the surreal, as when Sarah starts an AIDS group after deciding she has AIDS (and disbands it when her HIV test comes back negative a few hours later) or sleeps with God and then refuses to give him her number. She will often burst into songs on subjects like pooping at the mall. The show is reminiscent of the similarly offbeat Stella, but while that show died an early and unjust death, Silverman's show has already been renewed. Perhaps that is because there is no sacred cow she won't eat, making her a good replacement for South Park, which may still butcher sacred cows but which hasn't been funny for the last couple of years.
While the character is self-absorbed, the show itself is generous to its cast, granting everyone some laughs. Most notable are Brian Posehn and Steve Agee as Sarah's gay friends, who turn up in goofy subplots (at one point each goes to bizarre lengths to prove they are a great fan of the soft drink Tab, although neither is). The cast is rounded out by Sarah's sister Laura Silverman (she voiced the secretary in Dr. Katz, but here she's nicer and thus doesn't get as many of the good jokes) and Jay Johnston, who along with Posehn used to appear on the bizarre HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show. Everyone is good.
The Sarah Silverman Program is one of those comedies, like Seinfeld, that likes to focus on our worst instincts; the show works because even though most of us wouldn't grab the crown from a little girl, we all understand wanting to. Silverman seems to have a special insight into the baseness of the human soul. Which makes me wonder: perhaps, Sarah Silverman, the smart, funny, gosh darn cute stand-up comedian and actress really is a horrible person.
But at least she's not alone.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
It was an especially gloriously transgressive moment when post-coitally rebuffed "Black God" showed up as her long-lost father- and then started putting the moves on her.