Comedian Sarah Silverman said she decided to move away from her “arrogant, ignorant” character in a comedy sketch after former President Trump was elected because she embodied the character “totally” and it no longer resonated with her.
Silverman spoke about her thoughts on an episode of the podcast “Fail Better” with David Duchovny.
“It wasn’t a conscious thought of, ‘That’s not working, so let’s try something different.'” Silverman says“So I guess I just started to change quite naturally.”
Silverman said she was “totally playing a character” in her 2005 comedy special “Jesus is Magic,” which she continued on as “The Sarah Silverman Program,” a Comedy Central show that ran from 2007 to 2010. The character, she said, was “arrogant and ignorant.”
“So the whole thing about Trump winning wasn’t until Trump was elected, and especially once Trump was elected and the world changed the way it did, the character just wasn’t really interesting to me anymore, because he embodies that so perfectly,” Silverman said.
Duchovny questioned whether Silverman had dropped the character because audience reaction had changed, to which she replied, “No.”
“It wasn’t like, ‘Well, audiences aren’t laughing at my racist jokes anymore,'” she said.
“This is art. It’s like a painting hanging on the wall of a museum. If you go and look at it every day, it changes your life, it changes your experience, it completely changes the world around you, so this changes too,” Silverman continued. “So what you’re looking at ends up being interpreted in a whole new light.”
Silverman said she learned early in her career that comedy dies when comedians second-guess what the audience thinks. Comedians have to stay true to what they think is funny, but that changes over time, she said.
“In a way, what I did doesn’t work because it was born out of white privilege,” she said, noting how much society has changed.
She shared an anecdote about when Prince won Best Black Artist at the 1984 American Music Awards. She said she didn’t think much of it at the time, but now she’s surprised it was a different award. Silverman predicted that one day society will look back on “Best Actress” and “Best Actor” in the same way, because everyone will see them in a new light that they don’t see now.
“We don’t know what we don’t know now,” she said, “and that’s part of why I think it’s important, on a cellular level, to learn from and change from the past.”
“But litigating the past is, to me, a less than successful situation because we all only knew what we knew up to that point,” Silverman continued. “Looking back on the past is embarrassing, but it’s only embarrassing if we haven’t changed since then.”
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
