Sarah Silverman

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**Sarah Silverman**
Born:	December 1, 1970 Bedford, New Hampshire
Occupation:	stand-up comedian, actress, writer

Sarah Kate Silverman (born December 1, 1970) is a American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. While usually credited as Sarah Silverman, she is sometimes credited by her nickname Big S or Sarah 'Big S' Silverman.<ref>[1]</ref>‎

Her innocent outward appearance and sing-song delivery is in direct contrast to much of her comic material, in which she deals with many controversial topics such as racism, abortion, rape, death, scatology, and child abuse, among others. Her comedy-acts are sometimes performed from a caricatured or stereotypical Jewish-American princess perspective.

1 Personal life
2 Career
- 2.1 Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
- 2.2 Controversies
3 Trivia
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Personal life

Silverman was born in Bedford, New Hampshire to Jewish-American parents Donald and Beth Ann Silverman, of Russian and Polish extraction. She has three sisters: Susan Silverman-Abramowitz, a rabbi and author of Jewish Family & Life: Traditions, Holidays, and Values for Today's Parents and Children, actress Laura Silverman (who plays one of her friends in the film version of Jesus is Magic), and screenwriter Jody Speyer.

One of Silverman's earliest acting roles was as a 12-year-old starring in the title role of a Community Players of Concord production of Annie. She performed stand-up comedy in her teens — in an October 2005 profile in The New Yorker, her sister Susan recalled an early performance at a Mexican restaurant when the 17-year-old Sarah sang a song called "Mammaries" (to the tune of "Memories…"), about wishing she had breasts.<ref name="newyorker">Dana Goodyear. Quiet Depravity: The demure outrages of a standup comic. The New Yorker. 24 October 2005. Retrieved 10 March 2006</ref> Silverman attended New York University for one year, but left to concentrate on her stand-up career.

Silverman talked about having dated Dave Attell on one of her appearances on the Howard Stern radio show. Silverman was also romantically linked with Colin Quinn during her Saturday Night Live career, which is referred to humorously by both parties. According to NNDB.com, she also dated comedian Sam Seder.[2] In her first appearance on the Stern show in June 2001, she said she was dating someone named Tom who wrote for SNL and Michael Moore, likely Tom Gianas.[3]

Since 2002, Silverman has been in a relationship with Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live. It is a relationship she refers to in some of her comic material:

"I wear this Saint Christopher medal sometimes because–I'm Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic –it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn through my skin it will protect me." <ref name="newyorker" />

"I'm not going to make fun of Jimmy anymore because he might withhold his tiny penis from me."

Other evidence is revealed in one of Jimmy Kimmel's skits, Part 4 of the R&B Opera "The Pizza", where Sarah plays his "girl".

Silverman is a huge Jenny Lewis fan, and she appeared in one of her music videos.

Silverman is very open about her lifelong battle with clinical depression, crediting her freedom from attacks of despair to her use of prescription Zoloft. She is a teetotaller because she says alcohol nauseates her. She has, however, claimed that she smokes marijuana at least four days out of each week. <ref>Vanessa Grigoriadis. "Dirty Rotten Princess". Rolling Stone. 3 November 2005. Retrieved 10 March 2006.</ref>

According to Kimmel, in an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Silverman doesn't want to get married until same-sex couples are able to.

Silverman reveals in her standup act that her sister Laura found out that the village in Russia their great-great-great-grandmother came from was raped and pillaged by Mongolians. She humorously adds that that makes her "part Mongolian rapist".

[edit] Career

Within three years Silverman had a major career break: She earned national exposure after earning a role on the 1993-94 season of Saturday Night Live. She was a writer and featured player at this time, but was fired after one season because she had written only one sketch that survived through to dress rehearsal and none which made it to air. Bob Odenkirk, a former SNL writer who knew her from her stand-up act in Los Angeles, commented on why she was fired<ref name="newyorker" />: "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 states that she was fired by SNL in an undignified manner (via fax) and this upset her greatly.

This situation (her skits not being used) was parodied when she appeared in The Larry Sanders Show episode The New Writer in which she appears as the new writer on Larry's staff and her jokes are not used because of the chauvinism and bias of the male head comedy writer who favors the jokes of his male co-writers.

She then moved on to the HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show with Bob and David, where she was a featured performer. Silverman made guest appearances on such programs as the 1997 Seinfeld episode "The Money," the two-part time-travel episode "Future's End" of Star Trek: Voyager and as a series regular on the TV show Greg the Bunny (2002), playing serious characters, as well as the voice of character "Hadassah Guberman" on the salacious puppet television comedy Crank Yankers. She has also had small parts in films such as There's Something About Mary, Say It Isn't So, School of Rock, The Way of the Gun, Overnight Delivery, Screwed, Heartbreakers, and Rent, again playing serious roles. On November 11, 2005, her stand-up comedy act (one-woman show) was released as a feature film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic. As part of the publicity campaign surrounding the film, Silverman made several high profile appearances, including online in Slate, as the cover subject of Heeb magazine, and performing on the Comedy Central roasts of Pamela Anderson and Hugh Hefner.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live, she has parodied sketches from Chappelle's Show, as a point of view of what would happen if she played Rick James, Tyrone, or the Pilot Boy Productions-like logo called Pilot Girl Productions. This segment is based on a popular rumor that Silverman is a planned replacement for Dave Chappelle after the apparent demise of his popular television show.

Sarah recently made the cover of London's March 12, 2006 Sunday Observer magazine with an article titled "If women aren't funny, how come the world's hottest, most controversial comedian is female?"<ref>[4]</ref>.

She placed #50 in the annual Maxim magazine Hot 100 List.

[edit] Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Image:Silvermanjesusmagic.jpg On November 11, 2005, Silverman's concert movie, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic was released in eight theatres. Based on her popular one-woman show of the same name, it was directed by Liam Lynch and distributed by Roadside Attractions. Receiving positive reviews, it made just under $125,000 opening weekend, and had the highest per screen average on only 7 screens. Its performance led to an expanded release in as many as 57 theatres, resulting in a box office take of more than $1.3 million. The movie released on DVD on June 6, 2006, with an official soundtrack released on the same day. The soundtrack featured songs in the movie, some of her stand up from the movie, and some previously unreleased songs.

[edit] Controversies

Silverman caused a brief controversy after using the ethnic slur "chink" in an interview on the July 11, 2001 episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In the interview, Silverman explained that a friend had advised her on how to avoid jury duty by writing a racial slur on the selection form, "something really inappropriate, like, 'I hate chinks'." However, Silverman said that she ultimately decided that she did not want to be thought of as a racist and instead wrote, "I love chinks. And who doesn't?" Even though Silverman claimed to be satirizing the racist thought process, NBC and O'Brien issued an apology, but Silverman did not. She said in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that she was asked to repeat the joke on Politically Incorrect, among other places, but she eventually felt compelled to drop the joke from her act because she felt it was becoming stale.

Silverman has since turned the complaint into grist for her stand-up act, saying that the experience helped teach her the important lesson that racism is bad: "And I mean bad, like in that black way." Her stand-up act is similarly charged with outrageously ironic racist statements, delivered in a convincingly serious manner:

"Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people who believe it was the blacks."

"I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."

"Everyone knows that the best time to get pregnant is when you're a black teenager."

Another classic snapshot of Silverman is what Paul Provenza called a "disconcerting and uncomfortable" performance of the infamous joke called The Aristocrats in Provenza's documentary of the same name. In her version of the joke she accuses Joe Franklin of raping her, in a deadpan manner. Some viewers are not sure how to respond to humour in this normally taboo subject, often causing as much discomfort as laughter. (On the DVD release of the film, Provenza joked that Silverman had planned a publicity stunt in which she filed charges for the alleged rape).

Recently, Silverman made an appearance at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards. Her appearance was more of a stand-up routine but controversial ^{[citation needed]} because she joked about Paris Hilton being overweight and impersonal about her friendship with Nicole Richie.

[edit] Trivia

She appeared in the music video for "Rise Up with Fists!!" by Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins.
She played in the Legends and Celebrities Softball Game during the 2006 baseball All-Star game weekend in Pittsburgh, and played on the American League team. She grounded out to end the game.
On The Howard Stern Show, she admitted to struggling with bedwetting when she was a teen, though whether this was an example of deadpan humor is unclear. She said the last time she wet her bed was when she was fired from Saturday Night Live.<ref>[5]</ref>
In an episode of Seinfeld, she played Kramer's girlfriend who suffered from 'jimmy legs', medically known as Restless Leg Syndrome