Sarah Silverman: We are Miracles

Sarah Silverman’s HBO special,"We are Miracles," a comedy show performed for 39 embarrassed-looking patrons of a small dimly-lit club, isn’t a whole lot of fun. Silverman’s schtick is making outrageous and offensive statements, daring the audience to laugh, and, then, abusing the audience for indulging her with its laughter. This strategy would be effective if the audience were laughing spontaneously. But the audience understands how the gig is structured, grasps that laughter will be met with Silverman’s derisory scorn and so, we sense, that the audience is indulging her even before she draws attention to that fact -- the audience laughs because Sarah is cute and her pouting little-girl features don’t fit with her potty-mouth and the contrast between her pampered Jewish princess appearance and her vulgarity carries enough shock-value to make the crowd giggle a little regardless of whether what she says is actually funny. The audience laughs because it understands that its laughter is part of the joke: see, they are dumb and crass enough even to laugh at something that’s cruel and unfunny and that’s supposed to be funny in itself. Some of her stuff is well-observed and, like many successful stand-up comedians, there is a curious philosophical dimension to her material -- we laugh because the alternative would be something far more terrible and painful. As an example, Silverman blurts out that “9'-11 widows are famous for giving the best hand-jobs.” She pouts, looks earnest, and says that this has been proven by a study conducted by the University of North Carolina. The audience is uneasy and people laugh uncertainly. Then, Silverman denounces her spectators saying that they should be ashamed of themselves for believing her slander against the “9-11 widows” merely because she “attributed that finding to the University of North Carolina.” Shrugging her shoulders, she asks her LA audience if they’ve ever even been to North Carolina. In this way, Silverman says something terrible (although the incessant whining of 9-11 victims certainly has caused some of us to think bad things about them that we would never dare say), then, takes the offensive statement back, and, then, bizarrely enough imputes it to the audience. She does variations on this strategy for about forty minutes. But the HBO special has to fill an hour and so Silverman has a prologue before the show in which she exchanges racial slurs with a group of Mexican low-rider gangster-types (racial invective is always good as a time-filler) and, then, ends her show with a humorless song about being a diva, the lyrics consisting of the word “cunt” sung over and over again with various inflections. Once again, Silverman’s comic strategy is obvious -- she works the contrast between her pretty, well-trained church- choir-girl voice (she sounds like someone who would sing in the Xmas concert put on by St. Olaf College) and the raunchy material in her lyrics -- in this case, reduced to a single dirty word that she just repeats ad nauseum until she has wasted enough time to end her show. It’s stupidly effective. I like Sarah Silverman because I think she’s cute and I think her dirty mouth makes her even more cute. This isn’t Wittgenstein, I’m afraid, but more a matter of a perverse personal predilection.