In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

92 Sarah Silverman bedwetting, bOdy COMedy, and “a MOuth fuLL Of bLOOd Laughs” TOTALLY CUTE WHITE GIRL MORe than any OtheR COMiC COveRed in this book, Sarah Silverman challenges the pretty versus funny dynamic at its very root—the cultural identification of women with their bodies. Silverman performs gross-out comedy that defies cherished ideals of femininity but also confronts contempt for the female body as filthy or degraded. So hercomedy takes on theextremes of how women’s bodies are stereotyped, as messier than male bodies because of menstruation, childbirth , and lactation yet more idealized in versions of femininity that deny bodily functions altogether. The latter facet of the pretty/funny tradition in comedy has allowed male comics to engage in bathroom humor with the understanding that men don’t need to be pretty about these things. So when in her 2010 memoir,The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, Silverman describes her enthusiasm for bathroom humor, she acknowledges the gender transgression: “I have—not just for a female, but any human being—an inordinate love of farts. . . . Fart jokes make me happier than just about anything in the universe” (95). The qualification “not just for a female” cites the traditional expectations about femininity that Silverman gleefully smashes in her performances. As culture critic Paul Lewis puts it, “Show Silverman a taboo about sex, excrement, or the body and she’ll show you how it can be transgressed in a punchline.” Indeed, Silverman’s comic performances often provoke discomfort, using the body as comedy’s ground zero and inviting laughter at its unruliness .When Silverman’s cable sitcom premiered in 2007, a Salon review of its first few episodes complained that “The Sarah Silverman Program has all of the charms of a joke with an audible fart as the punch line” (Havric hapter t h r e e 93 ~ Sarah Silverman lesky). Equally disconcerting are Silverman’s reminders of the body as the sourceof prejudice and bigotry. She frequently lampoons the attribution of dirt and smelliness to bodies marked as “other” becauseof social, ethnic, or racial difference. In her concert film Jesus Is Magic (2005) Silverman tells heraudience about a Mexican woman who confronted her for saying Mexicans smell bad. “I had toexplain to her,” Silverman says patiently, “that you can’t smell yourself.” This is the comedyof political incorrectness that New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott describes as “a form of political correctness in its own right,” aiming to mock both bigotry and “hypersensitivity” about bigotry (“Comic”). At its best this comedy carries an unambiguous political punch. One of Silverman’s most-cited routines in Jesus Is Magic is an unsettling joke about white privilege and the invisible, racialized labor that produces luxury items such as diamonds. In this bit she praises the beautyofa jewel found only “on the tipof the tailboneof Ethiopian babies” and expresses regret about the “moral issue” of the badly treated unions “that debone the babies.” Silverman’s blasé delivery speaks what is usually silenced: indifference to the exploitation of nonwhite bodies for Western commodities. Describing the dynamics of Silverman’s offensive comedy, Scott observes that “everything she says is delivered through enough layers of selfconsciousness —air quotes wrapped in air quotes—to make anyone who finds it offensive look like a sucker” (“Comic”). However, the layers of air quotes do not entirely disarm Silverman’s outrageous commentaries, which can easily be read as the racism, homophobia, and intolerance they parody. In short, her politically incorrect comedy is a high-wire act with the risk of falling flat into cruel, not-so-ironic racism, a problem Silverman addresses at length in her memoir. She has also used criticisms of her political comedy to illustrate her own self-consciousness of her privileged status as white and “pretty.” In 2001 she found herself in a high-profile media controversy about her use of the term “Chink” in a joke on Late Night with Conan O’Brien (1993–2009). In Jesus Is Magic she describes the controversy and deadpans, “What kind of world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can’t say ‘Chink’ on network television?” As this suggests, Silverman’s girl-next-door prettiness is a major component in the shockeffect of hercomedy. Slate critic Sam Anderson remarks, “She’s pretty in a way that baits journalists into bodice-ripping Harlequin descriptions” such as “babelicious.” Describing Silverman’s persona and comedy, the headline of a New York Times article declared, “From...

Share