See Sarah Swear
The thing about the comedian Sarah Silverman is that she's very beguiling in a way you don't often see on television. She's the sexy, wholesome-looking Jewish girl next door. She may wear makeup, but she doesn't look as if she has to. She's refreshing that way. She doesn't seem to try to be attractive, or to need to be. And then she puts on a pretty little-girl expression and says something horrible about nothing.
"Tonight's episode of the 'Sarah Silverman Program' contains full-frontal Jewdity," the comedian warns (it's her best joke) in the opening scene of what, as far as I can tell from the screener sent by Comedy Central, will actually be the show's second episode rather than the pilot. Whichever episode it is, "tonight's" episode — which will be shown on Thursday — begins in broad California daylight, with Ms. Silverman, playing herself, waking up alone in a bed full of pillows and singing a cheerfully catchy ditty:
I always wake up with the morning sun / I always take my pills with herbal tea. I always never cry and I've always wondered why / I always have to watch myself when I go pee.
All this is done very fast in the style of a parody commercial — Sarah leaping out of bed joyfully greeting the new day; Sarah in the kitchen downing her prescription anti-depressants with a big smiley-face coffee cup; Sarah in the bathroom filming herself with a camera mounted on a tripod.
Then she's on the sidewalk outside her picturesque home, still singing, now to a little blond boy — perhaps 5 years old — on a tricycle, and the song continues:
I really love my life and I'll also tell you what / If I find a stick, I'll put it in your momma's butt / And pull it out and stick the doodee in her eye.
As she's singing the words, Sarah wags her finger mock-sternly at the boy, who initially seems bemused as she sings the words directly into his ear until the two of them turn and face the camera together. Now they smile gleefully in unison as if they were in some super-bouncy commercial for sugar-free gum.
Then we cut to Sarah in her orange Ford, still singing and smiling, as she pulls up outside a popular café in Silver Lake, a boho Los Angeles neighborhood. As she gets out of the car, she repeats the last line of the song, slowly this time, dramatically at first, as if it were the end of some soppy power ballad. A mischievous look crosses her face, followed by a toothy, self-satisfied grin, and the scene ends.
And then, before we've had time to wonder about the real-life boy, and the real-life parent who allowed him to be a part of this little jingle — or perhaps we don't wonder about it at all, even if it does verge on child abuse — we're in the café with Sarah and her sister (Laura Silverman), a good-hearted, attractive nurse who is the responsible sibling and pays Sarah's rent. Also present are Sarah's two "gigantic, orange, and gay" male friends, one of whom is heatedly claiming to be bisexual, to the snorting derision of the other. They sit around the café table and quibble, like similar groups in countless other shows, except that in this case the two women are cute but the two men are ugly. It's a new twist.
Which is to say, the show is a parody of a sitcom, complete with its little sitcom family — Sarah, her sister, her dog, her two friends, and whoever else might show up. On its own terms, the show is completely successful — flip, hip, and nasty. It's just a question of whether you accept the terms. For instance, because America has been bombarded by banal, shallow, annoying TV commercials for years, is it illuminating to parody those commercials with a truly loathsome jingle like the one quoted above? Or is it just adding hatefulness to emptiness?
Ms. Silverman's specialty is to take false problems, like overdeveloped racial or gender sensitivities, and then make inhuman, "daring" little jokes about them — fake humor about fake dilemmas. In a scene from this episode, for instance, Sarah compliments a 70-year-old black woman on how young she looks, and then, when the woman is so pleased she tries to give her a kiss, Sarah suddenly reverses herself and says, actually, she does look her age. "Bitch," the woman mutters, walking away. Of course, had she taken a course in "Cultural Theory," she'd have known to call her a "meta-bitch."
Ms. Silverman — or the version of herself she plays here — is a bit like Lenny Bruce in a world in which obscenity, or mock obscenity, has been mandated by the Entertainment Authorities. Rather than being jailed, hounded, put on trial for making dirty jokes, and winding up dead from an overdose of heroin, you are prescribed anti-depressants, appear on television, and are profiled at length in the New Yorker, four-letter words included. Your ironic brand of "meta-comedy" also provides fertile fodder for endless ponderings, as in this analysis, from Slate magazine:
"Silverman is a prototypical ironist — someone who says things she doesn't mean and (through more-or-less subtle contextual winks) expects us to intuit an unstated, smarter message underneath. But what is that message? Does she, like Socrates, play dumb in order to make us smart? Or just to experience the cheap thrill of public racism? Every ironic statement, should, in theory…." Etc., etc.
Ms. Silverman has been called "the funniest woman alive" by Rolling Stone, which is enough to make one weep for women. But perhaps it would be more to the point to weep for critics.
