THE PEACH PIT: SARAH SILVERMAN IS MAGIC

By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg

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I can’t remember why I didn’t like Sarah Silverman -- maybe it was because she embodies my boyfriend’s Chabad girl fetish a bit too well? But after watching her new Comedy Central show and her movie, Jesus is Magic, I could walk in on them doing some bar mitzvah role-playing and I’d still think she’s a dirty giggle festival of pussy/Jewish/Black/German car/Chinese/gay jokes that -- and this is the testament to her talent -- are actually funny without a taste of real venom.

Of dating a man who was half-black she explains how oversensitive he was, as evidenced by his offense at her “compliment” that, “he probably would've made, like, a really expensive slave in the, like, in the olden-timey days.” 

Of discussing the Holocaust with her young niece she explains the difference between Hitler killing 6 million Jews vs. 60 million: “Uh, the difference is that sixty million is unforgivable, young lady!’”

Silverman acts like a kid who, as a parent would say, takes a joke too far. She seems like the kind of person who would giggle at “testicular cancer” because it has the word testicular in it. (Sigh, my soulmate!) On the premiere of her Comedy Central show, The Sarah Silverman Program, she asks (sweetly, naively and psychotically) of her sister’s prospective date, “Why would he want to date a sex addict with a tiny vagina?”   

She announces during her stand-up routine in Jesus is Magic, apropos nothing (and I mean could this comment ever be apropos anything?): “I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend's penis and all of a sudden I'm thinking, ‘Oh My God, I'm turning into my mother!’”

Silverman isn’t just a wonderfully gifted potty mouth – she’s a performer. She has a crafted habit of tricking the audience into taking her seriously, then following up with the vulgarity she does so well. She tells a story of her seven-year-old niece coming out as a lesbian and how her sister actually punished her.

Pause.

“No pussy for a week. Right? I mean, to us, as adults, it may not seem like that big a deal, but to a little kid a week is, like, a really long time."

While watching Silverman, I couldn’t help but wonder: what sleep away camp did she go to? Camp (the sleep away kind, not the Heil kind) is a big part of most Jewish kids’ adolescent lives. It saved me from not kissing a guy until college. (While maybe you would "forget" it in front of the cool kids later – you know who you are.) It made me feel sort of hip n’ with-it for two months out of the year. That is, until my peers (or the peers I wanted to like me) became the kind of girls your mom had to admit were prettier than you. Perhaps that self-esteem crushing can be best explained with a small, yet poignant, story:

I was sitting around with the cool kids in the boys bunk. Everyone had to go around saying who the hottest 3 girls (or boys) were. Guess which participant was the only one to be left off the lists? Little, peach-fuzzed lip, 14-year old me. 

But I digress.   

Before those days we were openly – and gleefully – obsessed with sex and our sorta developing bodies – in a way that popular culture usually reserves for boys. Our gaggle of 12-year old girls put those proverbial boys to shame. We acted out, hysterically giggling, all the clichéd “sex” scenes we could think of: tales of prostitution and sleazy photographers figured prominently in these vignettes. (One time a small ladder fell on the “photographer,” who had drawn chest hair on herself, which created a moral predicament: Did she need to go to the nurse? If so, do we clean the chest hair off first?) 

We had contests of who could come up with the most inventive bikini (I seem to remember a maxi-pad and a pair of sunglasses being used, if that’s any indication of how un-buxom we were.) We dressed and danced as strippers (a skirt pushed up above our chest) and rated the best one. Often these festivities occurred after lights out so we had to be careful to avoid getting caught. One night a fellow bunkmate stood in the middle of the room showing us how she could braid her pubic hair. We heard the bunk door open and she dove onto another girl’s bed, hiding her proudest achievement.

Silverman would have fit right in.

The Sarah Silverman Program airs on Thursday nights at 10:30 pm on Comedy Central.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic is currently out on DVD.

TOTAL SCORES:
The Sarah Silverman Program 4.75 PEACH PITS (OUT OF 5)
Jesus is Magic 3.75 PEACH PITS (OUT OF 5)

MORE THE PEACH PIT

The Peach Pit is a weekly column on trashy TV and DVDs – except when Elizabeth compromises and watches her boyfriend’s choices.

Comments

[Brian]

A 12-year-old Buffy with a mustache is a surprisingly cute image.

[Jessica Hernandez-Speer]

If that happened on my watch, you are SO busted, missy! You'll have to have a serious conversation with the teddy bears and fess up publicly at Town Meeting...

[Elizabeth (Buffy) Weill-Greenberg]

Hi Jessie,

How about we meet at the white chairs first period?
Bonne Nuit! :) Buffy

[Elizabeth (Buffy) Weill-Greenberg]

Oh, Brian, if only my path had crossed with Emma's years earlier -- you could have joined me at commie camp in the country!
Buffy :)

[Jennie]

Did you know that around 1999 or 2000 that bunk was reconfigured so that it was all one room? This meant that when I was a counselor in there my campers could never do what we did without getting caught by OD, which is kind of sad. I'm pretty sure they never tried anything, because I was on OD a lot and I never caught them. Maybe they just weren't as creative as us. Unless, they just did it very very quietly...