Sarah Silverman
Sarah Kate Silverman is an American stand-up comedian, actress and writer. She first rose to prominence for her brief stint as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 19th season, between 1993 and 1994. She then starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010 on Comedy Central. For her work on the program, Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
She has also acted in television projects such as Monk, Mr. Show and V.I.P. and starred in films, including Who's the Caboose?, School of Rock, Take This Waltz, A Million Ways to Die in the West, and Battle of the Sexes. She also voiced Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph, and Ralph Breaks the Internet. For her lead role in I Smile Back she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She released an autobiography The Bedwetter in 2010 which she adapted into an off-Broadway musical in 2022.
Her comedy roles address social taboos and controversial topics, including racism, sexism, homophobia, politics, and religion, sometimes having her comic character endorse them in a satirical or deadpan fashion. During the 2016 United States presidential election, she became increasingly politically active; she initially campaigned for Bernie Sanders but later spoke in support of Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. She hosted the Hulu late-night talk show I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman from 2017 until late 2018.
Early life and education
Silverman was born in Concord, New Hampshire, on December 1, 1970, to Beth Ann and Donald Silverman. She lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Bedford, New Hampshire, as a child, attending McKelvie Middle School in the latter town. Her mother had been George McGovern's personal campaign photographer and founded the theater company New Thalian Players, while Donald trained as a social worker and also ran a clothing store, Crazy Sophie's Outlet. Silverman's parents divorced and later married others. Silverman is the youngest of five children. Her sisters are Reform rabbi Susan Silverman, writer Jodyne Speyer, and actress Laura Silverman; her brother Jeffrey Michael died when he was three months old. She is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent but considers herself nonreligious. Her ancestors were from Poland and Russia, and she has stated her maternal grandmother escaped the Holocaust. She was in attendance when women lit menorahs at the Western Wall for the first time, in December 2014.Silverman's first stand-up comedy performance was in Boston at age 17. She described her performance as "awful". After graduating from The Derryfield School in Manchester in 1989, she attended New York University for a year, but did not graduate. Instead, she performed stand-up in Greenwich Village.
Career
1992–2007: Career beginnings and ''Jesus Is Magic''
Silverman began her professional standup career in 1992. Silverman was part of the 1993–94 season of the NBC sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live for eighteen weeks as a writer and featured player. She was fired after one season. Only one of the sketches she wrote made it to dress rehearsal and none aired, though she did appear on the show as a cast member in sketches, usually in smaller supporting roles. Former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk remarked, "I could see how it wouldn't work at SNL because she's got her own voice, she's very much Sarah Silverman all the time. She can play a character but she doesn't disappear into the character—she makes the character her." Silverman has retrospectively stated that she was not ready for SNL when she secured the job, and that when she was fired, it hurt her confidence for a year but nothing could hurt her thereafter. She has cited her SNL stint as a key reason why she has been so tough in her career, and later expressed gratitude that her time on the program was short as it did not wind up defining her. She parodied the situation when she appeared on The Larry Sanders Show episode "The New Writer", playing Sanders' new staff writer, whose jokes are not used because of the chauvinism and bias of the male chief comedy writer, who favors the jokes of his male co-writers. She appeared in three episodes of Larry Sanders during its final two seasons.She also starred in the HBO sketch comedy series Mr. Show and had the leading role for the 1997 independent film Who's the Caboose?, about a pair of New York comedians going to Los Angeles during pilot season to try to get a part in a television series; the film features numerous young comedians in supporting roles but never received a widespread theatrical release. Silverman and Seder later made a six-episode television series sequel titled Pilot Season in which Silverman stars as the same character and Seder again directed. She made her network stand-up comedy debut on the Late Show with David Letterman on July 3, 1997.
Silverman made several TV program guest appearances, including on Star Trek: Voyager in the two-part time-travel episode "Future's End" ; Seinfeld in the episode "The Money" ; V.I.P. in the episode " Hours" ; Greg the Bunny as a series regular ; and on the puppet television comedy Crank Yankers as the voice of Hadassah Guberman. She had small parts in the films There's Something About Mary, Say It Isn't So, School of Rock, The Way of the Gun, Overnight Delivery, Screwed, Heartbreakers, Evolution, School for Scoundrels, Funny People and Rent, playing a mixture of comic and serious roles.
In 2005, Silverman released a concert film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, based on her one-woman show of the same name. Liam Lynch directed the film, which was distributed by Roadside Attractions. It received 64% positive ratings based on 84 reviews on the film critics aggregator Web site Rotten Tomatoes and earned approximately $1.3 million at the box office. As part of the film's publicity campaign, she appeared online in Slate as the cover subject of Heeb magazine and in roasts on Comedy Central of Pamela Anderson and Hugh Hefner.
Silverman played a therapist in a skit for a bonus DVD of the album Lullabies to Paralyze by the band Queens of the Stone Age. Silverman also appears at the end of the video for American glam metal band Steel Panther's "Death To All But Metal". On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Silverman parodied sketches from Chappelle's Show, replaying Dave Chappelle's characterizations of Rick James and "Tyrone" as well as a Donnell Rawlings character based on the miniseries Roots. In 2006, Silverman placed 50th on Maxim Hot 100 List. In 2007, she placed 29th and appeared on the cover.
2007–2010: ''The Sarah Silverman Program''
Her television sitcom, The Sarah Silverman Program, debuted on Comedy Central in February 2007; the series had 1.81 million viewers and portrayed the day-to-day adventures of fictionalized versions of Silverman, her sister Laura, and their friends. A number of comedic actors from Mr. Show have appeared on The Sarah Silverman Program. Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for her acting on the show. At the awards ceremony, she wore a fake mustache. Comedy Central canceled The Sarah Silverman Program after three seasons.In June 2007, she hosted the MTV Movie Awards. During her opening act, she commented on the upcoming jail sentence of Paris Hilton, who was in the audience, saying: "In a couple of days, Paris Hilton is going to jail. As a matter of fact, I heard that to make her feel more comfortable in prison, the guards are going to paint the bars to look like penises. I think it is wrong, too. I just worry she is going to break her teeth on those things." In September 2007, she appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards. Following the comeback performance of Britney Spears, Silverman mocked her on stage, saying: "Yo, she is amazing, man. I mean, she is 25 years old, and she has already accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in her life."
In January 2008, she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to show Jimmy Kimmel, her boyfriend at the time, a special video. The video turned out to be a song called "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" in which she and Matt Damon sang a duet about having an affair behind Kimmel's back. The video created an "instant YouTube sensation." She won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics at the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards. Kimmel responded with his own video a month later with Damon's friend Ben Affleck, which enlisted a panoply of stars to record Kimmel's song "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck". On September 13, 2008, Silverman won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for writing the song "I'm Fucking Matt Damon". Silverman guest-starred in a second-season episode of the USA cable program Monk as Marci Maven. She returned in the sixth-season premiere and for the 100th episode. According to the audio commentary on the Clerks II DVD, director Kevin Smith offered her the role that eventually went to Rosario Dawson, but she turned it down out of fear of being typecast in "girlfriend roles". However, she told Smith the script was "really funny" and mentioned that if the role of Randal Graves was being offered to her she "would do it in a heartbeat." She appeared in Strange Powers, the 2009 documentary by Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara about cult songwriter Stephin Merritt and his band The Magnetic Fields. Silverman wrote a comic memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which was published in 2010.