WASHINGTON — She’s known for her no-holds-barred style of stand-up.
This Saturday, the side-splitting Sarah Silverman cracks up MGM National Harbor in Maryland.
“Come out if you think I’m your cup of tea,” Silverman told WTOP. “It’s not for children, it’s sometimes explicit, but I talk a lot about family — but that’s explicit, too!”
Growing up in Bedford, New Hampshire, Silverman fell for comedy watching all the greats.
“I worshipped Steve Martin. I loved him so much,” Silverman said. “My mom had a double album of Woody Allen and we listened to that all the time. I loved Albert Brooks, Martin Short, all the people I still really admire. I liked intellectual stuff and I liked aggressively silly stuff. I find they combine often.”
At age 17, she first performed her first stand-up gig in Boston. After high school, she attended New York University. In her spare time, she passed out fliers for the Boston Comedy Club, earning stage time in exchange. She dropped out of college after her freshman year to pursue stand-up full time.
“My dad said, ‘If you quit, I’ll pay the next three years — sophomore, junior, senior year — of your rent, a great deal because college is so expensive,” Silverman said. “He knew [for] what I was doing, I didn’t need a diploma, so instead of paying for college, he paid my $350-a-month rent and utilities. By the time I would’ve graduated, I was writing for ‘Saturday Night Live!’ Addendum: I was fired a year later.”
Indeed, her run at “SNL” only lasted one season in 1993-94. Looking back, why did it end so quickly?
“I kept all my sketches and read them, and they’re not funny,” she said. “I wasn’t me yet. … I was very good at ‘punching up.’ … I was really good on Thursday nights when we punched up all the scripts. Besides that, I was young and didn’t have a lot to contribute at that point. … Lots of individual jokes made it into sketches, and I made it on ‘[Weekend] Update’ a lot, but my sketches weren’t funny.”
She remembers one high-concept sketch that didn’t make the cut.
“Phil Hartman … had seen me do stand-up and said, ‘Write something for you and me to do together,'” Silverman said. “I wrote this thing where we were houseflies. Houseflies only live 24 hours, so he was at the end of his life and I was young and he was giving advice while we sat on the wall watching a dog go to the bathroom. … It was written in the frame of ‘Masterpiece Theatre,’ very weird stuff. Esoteric.”
So, Silverman picked herself up and hit the road to perfect her comedic craft during stand-up gigs.
“Stand-up was always there for me,” she said. “It was a long road. I got fired from ‘Saturday Night Live’ so I felt worthless. I moved to L.A. and immediately booked a sitcom. The day before we shot it, I got fired from that! That gave me a real complex that I was gonna always be fired. Even when I was hired for things, I was constantly waiting to be fired. [Eventually] I was able to hold onto jobs for a while.”
She appeared on such TV shows as “Star Trek: Voyager,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Seinfeld,” in which she played a memorable role as Kramer’s girlfriend who had a bad case of “The Jimmy Legs.”
“I think that was the most excited I’ve ever been from getting a job from an audition,” Silverman said. “I just couldn’t believe it, because ‘Seinfeld’ was already an institution. I was actually Kramer’s girlfriend, so all of my scenes were with him and it was really cool. I remember Jerry said I looked too young. I was so young, so they gave me, like, ‘older-woman hair.’ … Now, I warrant older-woman hair.”
Eventually, she got her own Comedy Central show, “The Sarah Silverman Program” (2007-2010).
“Everyone who worked on it, we were either already best friends or we became best friends,” Silverman said. “It was a group where whenever we see each other now, we’re like, ‘Oh no! Is that going to be the happiest time of our lives? Did it already happen?’ It was pure joy. It felt like home.”
It felt even more like home because her older sister Laura played her younger sister on screen.
“When I told her she was playing my younger sister, she was like, ‘Thank you!'” Silverman said.
Around the same time, she also began landing film roles in “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), across Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz, and “School of Rock” (2003), across Jack Black. The films were such hits that she booked “Wreck it Ralph” (2012) and “A Million Ways to Die in the West” (2014).
“‘Mary’ was my first movie that went into movie theaters. That was really fun. The Farrelly Brothers are hilarious,” Silverman said. “‘School of Rock’ was so funny. … Jack is exactly him; that’s who he is. … But when you’re shooting it, I’m making people laugh and being me, then you watch the movie and I’m just this angry b***h character. It’s a little soul-killing. … It’s hard to shake off the b****y girlfriend role, the first girlfriend before the guy realizes what love can be! That’s always what the Jewish girls get.”
Ironically, it was a girlfriend role in her personal life that sparked one of her biggest pop-culture contributions. While dating Jimmy Kimmel at the time, she teamed with Matt Damon to create the hilarious “I’m F*@#ing Matt Damon” sketch, which aired on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” before going viral.
“[Kimmel] was having a birthday show and didn’t want to know any of the content,” Silverman said. “He had been ending the show with, ‘Sorry Matt Damon, we ran out of time,’ which he still does. … A couple writers came up with the idea that I do a video that I’m bleeping Matt Damon. I was on tour, went through Miami where Matt was living at the time … Matt came in, learned the song [and filmed] all around the hotel. We had three hours with Matt. … He was so awesome. Then we never aired it!”
Turns out, a Hollywood writers’ strike had temporarily shelved the sketch.
“We pulled it out [for] the five-year anniversary of the show and it was still a surprise,” Silverman said. “I remember we were brushing our teeth in his dressing room and Jimmy’s like, ‘I can’t wait to see what you did! Everyone’s saying I’m gonna love it!’ … He loved it. … I think it was just early enough in the internet that it connected. … I saw it again recently and I was like, ‘That was so good! It holds up!'”
Years from now, Silverman’s comedy will still hold up. Funny is funny, no matter how you slice it.
“What a life,” Silverman said. “If my childhood me only knew what adulthood me would be!”
Click here for more information on Saturday’s show at MGM National Harbor in Maryland. Listen to the full conversation with Sarah Silverman below. WARNING: The following interview contains explicit content:
