If it Doesn’t Burn
Through Your Skin...
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
by Elizabeth Slavitt
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Sarah Silverman is telling jokes and everyone is laughing. Sarah is cute and thin and sexy. Her long black hair is straight and silky, and she knows how to seduce every member of the filled-to-capacity auditorium with her girlish giggle and coy expressions. The people watching her show are mainly well-dressed adults, and they seem respectable enough. At least outwardly, they don’t seem like racist, anti-Semitic homophobes. But Sarah’s act consists almost entirely of racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic jokes, and the audience is definitely laughing. Did they know that the act was being filmed, audience and all, for a Sarah Silverman movie called Jesus is Magic? Would they have laughed so openly if they had?
Jesus is Magic brings Sarah Silverman’s comedy routine to the big screen. Interwoven into her act are a few musical numbers and some scenes with her friends and agent, but for most of the movie we watch Sarah tell offensive jokes to a large audience. Every person in the movie theater, myself included, laughed for the eighty shockingly glorious minutes of Jesus is Magic when I saw it in December. I do not like racist jokes. I promise. But I couldn’t help laughing (and then looking around to confirm that, despite the extremely offensive nature of Sarah’s words, everyone else was laughing too). I think they included shots of the audience laughing throughout the movie to comfort otherwise politically-correct moviegoers when they let out an uncensored guffaw after a particularly absurd joke.
After talking briefly about AIDS in Africa, Sarah cocks her head slightly and, in her sing-song innocent voice, suggests, “When God gives you AIDS (and God does give you AIDS), make lemonAIDS.” Her clarification that God does give you AIDS is adamant; she whips herself out of the thoughtful, philosophical state she’s been in while discussing ways to deal with AIDS, and as though she’s spoken to Him herself, she reminds any doubters that the Almighty dispenses this disease as a punishment of sorts. She pauses, and the audience—both at the show and in the movie theater—erupts in laughter. We’re laughing at her because she’s a comedian and we’re supposed to laugh, but we’re also laughing because what she’s saying is absurd, and we can’t help but laugh at someone who would think like that. But as we sit there, laughing at what Ms. Silverman has just said, we know she’s laughing too. Not outwardly—she knows how to manipulate us with a well-placed giggle and a perfectly-timed deadpan—but we somehow realize that she’s just pretending to think that way, that for all the racist, ignorant, homophobic, anti-Semitic things she says, Sarah Silverman is making fun of people who say and think things like that when they’re not on a stage, raking in dough for making us laugh.
And almost everyone seems to agree. The New Yorker ran a lengthy piece praising the comedian for her bold, groundbreaking comedy. Only once did the article suggest an air of criticism, though even this came from another source altogether. Sarah’s use of the word “chink” in a joke mocking racism prompted Guy Aoki, of the advocacy group Media Action Network for Asian Americans, to protest until the network apologized, though Sarah herself never did. The comic of context, Sarah argued that Mr. Aoki heard a buzzword and reacted without paying attention to the point of her joke. In the whole article, which included a biography of Ms. Silverman, excerpts from Jesus is Magic, and commentary on the comedian, the Guy Aoki incident was the only example of a negative reaction to Sarah.1 In a country obsessed with political correctness, people seem to get it: Sarah Silverman has taken on the anti-racism game with a whole new spin.
While Ms. Silverman’s humor runs the gamut of prejudices and offenses, her mockery of Jews is particularly compelling as she is a Jew herself. Toward the beginning of her show, Sarah stares at the audience like she wants to tell them a deep, dark secret: “I was raped by my doctor.” She pauses and puts on her characteristically confused face—eyebrows furrowed, lips slightly pursed—and continues: “which is so, you know, bittersweet as a Jewish girl.”
Later: “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ,” ruminates Sarah. “And then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans.” She pauses, then proudly shares her analysis: “I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.”
There is an element of self-deprecation in some of Sarah’s Jewish jokes, but others are so shockingly offensive that they demand further analysis. Ms. Silverman shares a story about her seven-year-old niece (whom she earlier classifies as an out-of-the-closet lesbian). Her niece calls her up one day and tells her that at her Jewish day school she learned that Hitler killed sixty million Jews in the Holocaust. After Sarah clarifies that it was six million, not sixty million, her niece asks, “well what’s the difference?”
“The difference?” Sarah retorts. “The difference is that sixty million would be unforgivable.”
Sarah Silverman pulls off jokes like this one through a careful combination of good timing, shock value, and absurdity. Through her innocent expressions and girly voice, she gives her audience permission to be uncomfortable. Like most of her jokes, Sarah’s Holocaust scene provokes laughter and shock because it is ridiculous, but it also represents a viewpoint held by actual people (Sarah not included). When speaking about the Holocaust at a different part of the act, Sarah interrupts herself to insert the word “alleged” before Holocaust. In effect, by making such unabashedly racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and otherwise prejudiced statements in an unapologetic (but somehow endearing) way, Sarah mocks those who maintain such views. Though it seems contradictory, by ridiculing the Holocaust, Ms. Silverman further establishes herself as a concerned young Jewish woman. She takes on Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism as battles her generation must fight. Even Heeb Magazine, a cutting-edge magazine for young Jews, raved about the revolutionary work of Ms. Silverman.2 Their praise of a Jewish comedian telling outwardly anti-Semitic jokes demonstrates the American Jewish audience’s readiness to address such issues in a new way. Furthermore, Sarah’s shocking, absurdist humor is a form of activism in its own right. She allows her audience to laugh at politically-incorrect statements, but in so doing, she forces them to think.
“I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes,” Sarah begins her riffs on religion. She continues, talking about how she’s Jewish but her boyfriend is Catholic. “He told me that if it doesn’t burn through my skin, it will protect me!” Ms. Silverman thinks out loud for a while about how if they have kids, they’ll be open-minded and let them select whichever religion they want. “And we’ll just say, Mommy is one of the Chosen People, and Daddy believes Jesus is magic!”
Sarah Silverman has established herself as a boundary-crossing, daring, shocking, absurdist comedian, but she’s also doing something else. She’s using comedy to ridicule society, to make her audience think, to pull us away from the comfort of our daily humdrum to recognize how bizarre our long-held views might be. And, in a world rife with conflict, oppression, and prejudice, she gives us all a chance to laugh.
Elizabeth Slavitt is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is on the editorial board of The Penn Review, the University of Pennsylvania’s literary and visual arts magazine.
Notes
1. Dana Goodyear, “Quiet Depravity” The New Yorker, October 24, 2005.
2. Rob Feld, “Cut-up Artist” Heeb Magazine, October 2005.