From "The Sarah Silverman Show" via ABC
Like a lot of people (excluding Joe Franklin), we enjoy the comedic stylings of the tawdry Sarah Silverman, and we've been fans ever since she was unceremoniously fired from Saturday Night Live via fax in the mid-90s (her SNL tenure was brilliantly parodied by her turn on The Larry Sanders Show). In other words, we've been in her alt-com corner for a long time, and we understand all of the recent media attention she's garnered, mainly for her role in The Aristocrats and her movie Jesus Is Magic. The debut of her new self-reflective sitcom on Comedy Central (The Sarah Silverman Program, which airs tonight at 10:30 p.m. EST) has brought forth yet another outpouring of ravish reviews and attempts to analyze her acid wit.
In other words, it's a typical press barrage.
But Silverman has proved that she is in a league of her own by generating two longish New Yorker pieces within a 16 month span-- a detail-rich 5,066 word profile by Dana Goodyear (pegged to the release of Jesus is Magic) that ran in the October, 24, 2005 issue, and this week's 1,408-word review of her new show by Tad Friend (he neither loved nor hated it). This is a feat that's rarely been achieved by the highest lords of literature, let alone a stand up comic who jokes about, well, bowel movements and her vagina. The steadfast, rock-solid New Yorker is notoriously parsimonious about covering the same cultural occurrences more than once (for good reason: they're The New Yorker, after all), which makes Silverman's coup all the more spectacular. Nearly 6,500 words of coverage from the the New Yorker? The closest most of us get to this is having two words (our name) on the subscription label.
Here's Silverman on The View today: "My racist jokes are very well thought-out and planned."
Related:
Sarah Silverman is magic (or has a great publicist) [FishbowlNY]
