Sarah Silverman

Interview By: J.P. Mangalindan
JPMangalindan@TheCinemaSource.com

'When God gives you AIDS, (and God does give you AIDS, by the way) make LemonAIDS.' ' Sarah Silverman

For Sarah Silverman, the Jewish comedienne from Beford, New Hampshire, nothing is off-limits. Slight frame and ostensibly wholesome-looking, she looks as harmless as your hip older cousin at a Bar Mitzvah, but catch the 34-year-old comic onstage and she'll crack jokes even your immature little brother might cringe at: she's poked fun at the Holocaust and September 11 and made a case for unwanted body hair. A Conan O'Brien appearance a few years ago, in which she casually used the word 'chink,' raised more than a few eyebrows.

Variety once described Silverman as the love child of Lenny Bruce and Sandra Bernhard ' 'explosively funny, unnervingly shocking and perversely adorable' ' but it's taken years for Silverman to polish her patent humor, a careful tightrope walk of the wholly irreverent and socially taboo, which has earned her respect among her peers and the critics. In an industry where females are rarely viewed equally by their male contemporaries, Silverman's street cred is a prized commodity.

'You know, when Jerry Lewis said, 'Women aren't funny,' it didn't hurt me inside like it maybe hurt some women comics,' Silverman says. 'To me at that point, if some old guy says women comics aren't funny, it's endearing if anything.' She compares the trial by fire women comics face to a competitive basketball game. 'When I would go to the Y to play basketball before the regulars at the pick-up game knew me at all or I would be in a new city, there's that anxiousness that you have to prove that you can play hard. You can kind of get that feeling as a woman in stand-up. If I ever had that feeling as a woman stand-up ' and I'm sure I did ' it was many years ago.'

Silverman's training began on the New York City club circuit, where she spent as many hours performing onstage as she did working toward her diploma at New York University, but the training paid off. By 22, she was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live, the hallowed stomping grounds for countless comics before her and innumerable talents to come.

With her good looks, Silverman's resume grew with appearances in the Warren Beatty political satire Bulworth, the runaway gross-out hit, There's Something About Mary and more recently as the uptight gal pal to Jack Black in 2003's School of Rock.

By now, Silverman was knee-deep in love with comic Jimmy Kimmel, who in 2002, had exited from his first marriage. They're still going strong, but as is often the case with comic performers, Silverman finds it hard to avoid making jokes about her squeeze.

'You're going to say jokes about your boyfriend or girlfriend because they're such a part of your life,' Silverman quips. 'You're always going to get material from that. It's like when a comic has a baby, you know he's going to get a whole new 20 minutes; it's probably the reason why he has one!' On more than one occasion though, Silverman admits Kimmel's broached her on the subject. 'He's said to me, 'You know, when you talk about your boyfriend's balls, they know that it's my balls that you're talking about. Please just keep that in mind!' I say, 'I know. Oh, I know.''

When The Aristocrats premiered this past summer, it would be an understatement to say Silverman's career took off: her 15-minute take on the raunchy Mad-Libbean Vaudeville joke garnered her attention from a wider audience. She remembers the day director Paul Provenza approached her to take part in what would become an all-star project including everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to Dana Gould.

'He came up to me and was like, 'We'll come to your house. It'll be easy. All these great people have done it.' So, they came over,' Silverman confesses. 'If you see it, they were there for 15 minutes. My hair is half back from washing my face; I have no make-up on. I'm wearing the wifebeater I slept in and the skirt I put on to walk my dog and yet, it's probably the best work I've ever done. It's funny: You do all these big projects thinking, 'This is going to be my big break,' putting so much time into them, when really, 10 minutes in your sublet apartment is enough to give you your big break!'

Her newest project, the film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, comes hot on the heels of The Aristocrats. Based on her one-woman show, Jesus is Magic features a segment before a live audience interspersed with varied musical numbers. On her performance, Rolling Stone's Peter Travers even went so far as to call her the 'most outrageously funny woman alive,' compliments to which Silverman grins and chuckles. Some of her favorite moments in it are also, go figure, some of the more controversial ones.

At the end of the movie, there's a B-roll where Silverman harps on Danny Thomas. One particular fan, coincidentally also a Thomas fan, felt she should have left him alone. 'He shouldn't be remembered that way,' Silverman remembers the fan saying to her. 'She's right. It was a little too late to take it out and really, the moment was kind of great.' She relents ' slightly.

'Danny Thomas should be remembered as a family man, a great performer and a philanthropist. The fact that he may have liked girls making doody on the coffee table while he sat underneath it should have no bearing on how he does down in history, but I do want to say that in Cantor's Deli, the sandwich named after him is the 'Number 2.''