Word: silverman
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...might expect Sarah Silverman, comedian, to be innately aware of a different higher calling, namely, to give Hitchens a rhetorical beatdown. But you would be wrong. "I got all these e-mails from magazines saying, 'Hey, would you write a rebuttal to this?'" she says. "I read it, and I thought, I'm just not offended by this at all. It is absolutely true--if you're going to generalize--that culturally, women don't have to be funny to attract the opposite sex. None of it made me mad, but none of that stuff ever does. It just doesn...
There are a few ways of reading that response. You could call it apathy, although Silverman cares about being funny. You could call it a kind of blasé postfeminism--What is this, like, 1973?--although Silverman's stand-up has always had a strong woman's consciousness. Or you could just call it confidence, which Silverman, 36, has every reason to feel. For more than a decade, she has been known as a comic's comic for her demurely provocative stage act--captured in the 2005 movie Jesus Is Magic--in which she delivers jokes about AIDS, race, the Holocaust...
...adapts her Jesus persona into sitcom form with The Sarah Silverman Program, a surreal mix of comedy, singing (she has a lovely, musical-theater voice) and animation that pushes more buttons than an Empire State Building elevator operator. In one episode, her character ("Sarah Silverman") sleeps with God, who is black, then blows him off, but not without guilt. "I'm not one of those people," she protests, "who's like, 'Oh, God is black--is he going to steal the moon or something?'" In another, she takes in a homeless man to upstage her sister's humanitarian boyfriend...
...Sarah Silverman Program (Thursdays, 10:30 p.m. E.T.) airs on--Hitchens, take note--guy-friendly Comedy Central, the network that gave us The Man Show (which her boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel, co-hosted). How did Silverman get invited into this male cable tree house? Executive vice president of original programming and development Lauren Corrao says Silverman's a rare woman comic whom guys like: "She's a beautiful woman, but her sensibility is very male." (Silverman has female fans too, although anecdotally, women seem more likely to find her grating or offensive than men do.) The most common explanation...
...Sarah Silverman Program plays off that tension--darkness and childlike naiveté--hilariously, although in a lighter-spirited way. The show has a loose, familiar, indie feel, in part because Silverman's real sister Laura plays her TV sister, the rest of the cast are longtime friends (along with her dog), and the pilot was shot in her apartment, which was re-created on a set for the series after, Silverman says, her landlord kicked the production...