Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman (born December 1, 1970, Bedford, New Hampshire, U.S.) is an American comedian, actress, and writer known for her subversive pointed commentaries on the social construction of race, gender, and religion.

Silverman’s father was a clothing store owner, and her mother was a photographer and theatre director. She and her three older sisters were raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, and then in Bedford, New Hampshire, following their parents’ divorce. Silverman characterized her upbringing as liberal and free of boundaries, with her father actively encouraging her use of profanity for his own amusement and her mother instilling in her a sense of skepticism and inquiry. Ever antic and eager to perform, Silverman began appearing in community theatre and school productions as an adolescent. However, she suffered from depression beginning at an early age and dealt with a bed-wetting problem that lasted into her teen years, issues she related in her memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (2010).

She first tried stand-up comedy in a Boston club at age 17. After enrolling at New York University to study drama, Silverman began distributing flyers for, and then performing at, New York City comedy clubs. She dropped out of school after a year, encouraged by her father, and concentrated on performance. In 1993 she was hired by Saturday Night Live but was fired after having only appeared in several segments and without a single sketch that she had written having been aired.

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Nonetheless, Silverman persisted, and in 1995–97 she performed on the sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David. She also made a number of appearances on Garry Shandling’s seminal talk show satire The Larry Sanders Show. Silverman continued to hone her blithely savage comic style in clubs and on talk shows. She often adopted a cheerfully narcissistic persona during her act, delivering lines about race and sex in an ironically insipid tone. Her feigned obliviousness and hyperbolic assertions indicated an underlying liberal sensibility. Nonetheless, some observers found her take on the subjects offensive. In a 2001 segment on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, she used a slur against Chinese people in a joke. Some charged that Silverman was being insensitive to racial issues, while she countered that it was in fact racism, not race, that she was mocking.

Silverman returned to television on the surreal sitcom Greg the Bunny (2002–04) and did voice work on a variety of comedy shows, notably the puppet show Crank Yankers (2002–07). Her first television stand-up special, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, aired in 2005. Silverman then went on to star in her own series, The Sarah Silverman Program (2007–10), in which she portrayed herself as an insensitive and unlikable boor, much as she did onstage. She presented a video of her parody song “I’m F***ing Matt Damon,” in which Damon costarred, on her then boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show. It won an Emmy Award for outstanding original music and lyrics in 2008. Another stand-up special, Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles (2013), won an Emmy for best writing for a variety special. Though retaining her signature disregard for propriety, the material was less reliant on the clueless character that had served as the vehicle for much of her commentary. Silverman continued to make occasional television guest appearances on shows such as Masters of Sex, about sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and the animated comedy Bob’s Burgers. She hosted the talk show I Love You, America (2017–18), which humourously addressed the country’s dissension following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Silverman’s early film work consisted mainly of small roles in such comedies as There’s Something About Mary (1998), Heartbreakers (2001), and School of Rock (2003). She later voiced one of the main characters, Vanellope von Schweetz, in the computer-animated children’s film Wreck-It Ralph (2012) and its sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Silverman also played a prostitute waiting to consummate her relationship with her fiancé until they marry in Seth MacFarlane’s goofball comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014). She won accolades for her dramatic performances as a recovering alcoholic in Take This Waltz (2011) and a substance-abusing adulterous suburban mother in I Smile Back (2015). Her later film credits included the thriller The Book of Henry (2017) and the biopic Battle of the Sexes (2017), which recounts the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Silverman’s other works included a musical adaptation of her memoir Bedwetter. She cowrote the book and lyrics for the production, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2022.

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