Sarah Silverman - 'I won't defend my jokes …it never ends well'

Published on Thursday 31 July 2008 19:33

She's been shocking America for years, but will Britain welcome pottymouth Sarah Silverman this autumn, asks Jay Richardson

WHEN Sarah Silverman posed as a louche Amy Winehouse in Vanity Fair recently, few could have predicted that their kinship went beyond being well-known Jewish princesses. But while the British pop singer sparked widespread concern and incomprehension when a bizarre film she'd shot for her husband – featuring mice and Pete Doherty – turned up on the internet, American comic Silverman was applauded for confessing to cheating on her boyfriend "on the bed, on the floor, on the towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against

the minibar…", in a song subsequently exposed to

YouTube and an audience currently approaching

10 million viewers.

Of course, Silverman and her accomplice Matt Damon were only kidding on that she was "f***ing Matt Damon" for the benefit of her beau, late-night chat host Jimmy Kimmel, as a surprise for his fifth-anniversary show.

With the Hollywood star gamely and repeatedly reiterating that, yes, Silverman was indeed "f***ing Matt Damon", Kimmel responded gallantly with his own video announcing that he was "f***ing Ben Affleck", featuring, as well as Affleck, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Robin Williams, Meat Loaf and Harrison Ford.

If, as widely predicted, I'm F***ing Matt Damon wins an Emmy next month, it will be something of a bittersweet irony, as less than a week before this interview was conducted, publicists confirmed that Silverman and Kimmel had split. Rather poignantly too, this weekend finally brings a UK cinematic release for Silverman's breakthrough 2005 concert film, Jesus Is Magic, which takes its title from Silverman's line about their relationship: "If my boyfriend, who's a Catholic, and I ever have a kid, we'll just be honest with it. We'll say that Mommy is one of God's chosen people and Daddy believes that Jesus is magic!"

"I still do some of those routines," admits Silverman, taking a break from filming her second series of The Sarah Silverman Program, the first run of which aired in the UK on the Paramount Comedy Channel. "And I'll play some of the songs on the road because it's fun to do them again live. It's hard because I'm working on my TV show all the time, so I'm not doing enough stand-up to have the amount of new stuff I should have. But we wrap in a week and I'm going to New York to focus on stand-up again."

The new series, which like Jesus Is Magic features Silverman's sister Laura in a perennially subordinate role to her sibling's self-obsession – "that's really fun, she has a lot more funny stuff this year" – also includes familiar faces from British screens, including Mighty Boosh collaborators Rich Fulcher and Matt Berry, who play "a minister" and "a representative of the dictionary", and former Time Lord Christopher Eccleston as Dr Laser Rage, the hero of a DVD box set purchased by Sarah's gay neighbour Brian.

Silverman is hoping to perform a few stand-up dates in the UK this autumn. Previously, her only visit to these shores was for Amnesty International's 2006 Secret Policeman's Ball, "which was so fun and exciting, everyone was so nice and I had a blast. I was mostly impressed by the audience, so many standing and the show lasted five hours. I went on about four hours in and everyone was still into it."

An attractive, slim brunette with a swanlike neck that she describes as "one of the best of my many good features", the 37-year-old projects a narcissistic, nave persona that frees her to express the most politically incorrect material, her wide-eyed bigotry pushed to ludicrous extremes.

She begins the film promising a show about the Holocaust and Aids, goes on to throw in a callously throwaway line about 9/11, then a love song comparing her affection to black guys calling each other "nigger" before a couple of alternately laughing and stony-faced African-Americans, eventually ending up in her dressing room, alone with her reflection, which she begins to kiss ravenously.

She wrote for Saturday Night Live between 1993 and 1994 but was fired after one season, and for many in the UK, their introduction to her humour was the film The Aristocrats, wherein she accepted the challenge of trying to tell the most distasteful version of a vaudeville in-joke by claiming that she'd been raped by Joe Franklin, a veteran US showbiz turn.

Franklin then threatened to sue, with the furore echoing her breakthrough appearance on the talk-show Late Night with Conan O'Brien, when her profile soared after a routine that turned on the word "chink". She addresses that controversy in Jesus Is Magic and, if anything, exacerbates it.

"I try to make it a practice to never defend or try to explain my jokes," she says. "It never ends well and definitely never ends funny. Sometimes people come up to me and say the most crude and disgusting things and I try to be gracious because I know they must think I like that stuff.

"To me there's a difference between surprising or honest or even graphic and just gross for gross's sake – a very subtle, but very big difference. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to explain it, but like the hairy animal I am, I just feel it instinctively, I guess."

Silverman has routinely stooped to bit-parts in movies, invariably playing the best friend or bitchy girlfriend in films like There's Something About Mary and School of Rock, but that's all in the past now.

"I'm really only interested in playing someone who is three-dimensional," she states. "I feel finished with the 'bitch' or 'sassy friend' that exists only to provide exposition for the main girl character. I don't care about the size of a role, I'm done playing the Band-Aid for shitty writing."

Exclusively attracted to funny men, she believes that ultimately, her gift to the world is "either laughter or herpes. Hopefully the former".

&#149 Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic is at selected cinemas from today, see page 4 for a review

&#149 The Sarah Silverman Program is on the Paramount Comedy Channel