Counter-Currents
2,399 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
An edgelord is born . . .
It seems like Sarah Silverman has been around forever, and in a way, she has, but she has only been a household name for about 15 years. In other words, she’s been famous for about as long as Rihanna.
Silverman is a Gen X-er and it shows. And she’s not exactly a late one, either. Born in 1970, she spent most of the ‘90s bumbling around the outskirts of the comedy industry, landing only a few bit parts on TV and a failed trial run on Saturday Night Live. She also spent much of that time trying to sleep her way to the top, from all the biggest standups in the New York scene, to Dave Attell, who had his own series on Comedy Central for a time, and eventually to Jimmy Kimmel, one of the late-night talk show hosts on the major broadcast networks.
By the time her breakthrough 2005 standup comedy film Jesus Was Magic was released, she was 34. She soon had her own Comedy Central program as well, when she was pushing 40. Silverman had her breakthrough just before the bell, while she still had a bit of youth left in her. Any longer and she would have been too old to be marketable.
Despite her late arrival, Silverman’s impact on culture was immediate and considerable. She has influenced just about every female comedian who came after her.
Early on, Silverman was like the female Andrew Dice Clay. There had been blue humor before, but the “Dice Man” took profanity to levels never before seen in mainstream comedy. Similarly, Silverman raised the bar of what it took to be an edgelord comedian by an order of magnitude. She would piss all over any and all sacred cows. She made fun of Christians, she would trample on liberal pieties as well. She would use racial slurs and make light of AIDS. Nothing was off the table.
Her style was very Gen X. Gen X prided itself on being the generation that wasn’t offended by anything. Our parents grew up on the Beatles and Leave It to Beaver, while we grew up on Mötley Crüe and slasher movies. We saw the rise of gangsta rap. We saw Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a bat. Nothing could shock us, because we’d seen it all. Silverman’s whole shtick in the 2000s was the essence of Gen X cool.
During the Bush years, when the President was saying that God told him to invade Iraq and the Christian Right was calling for a crusade against Muslims in the name of Jesus Christ (and Israel), her kind of “nothing is sacred” and “it’s all just a big laugh” nihilism seemed rebellious and transgressive. It was fairly apolitical for its time. Silverman was implicitly liberal, but there was no obvious agenda. In the era of post-9/11 hysteria, Silverman’s comedy was refreshingly escapist.
Sarah Silverman was funny in the same the way that men are funny. By that I mean that her sense of humor was dark and twisted in a way that you ordinarily associate with men. Naturally, women who want to be funny like men started imitating Sarah Silverman — and it’s a truism of comedy that women generally aren’t funny. There has long been speculation that much of her material was written by her comedian boyfriends like Dave Attell or Jimmy Kimmel, so it’s possible that she had a masculine sense of humor simply because her jokes were written by men.
Many women try to sleep their way to the top of the comedy. They’ll start dating a guy who can get them to the next level and then dump him for someone who can get them to the level after that. Others will take a less mercenary route and date a talented comic for a long time so they can have a free comedy coach on hand 24/7. Others still will date a comic and just have them write all their material. Guys will go along with it on the idea that if their girlfriends become famous, they’ll be able to ride her coattails like Tom Arnold. But it often doesn’t work out like that, and she dumps him when she gets to the next level.
You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here
Amy Schumer is a case in point. Schumer dated comedians on her rise to the top, including Anthony Jeselnik, one of the most talented comedy writers in the business. When Schumer made it to the big time, she switched to dating celebrities. Then she started being accused of stealing jokes. Once she stopped dating comedians, she magically forgot how to write jokes and started stealing. That is strong circumstantial evidence that her boyfriends were writing her material.
Be that as it may, I would still consider Silverman a talented comedic performer, far more so than Amy Schumer. Good comedic performers are not always good comedic writers, and vice versa. Lucille Ball was allegedly not funny at all off-camera, but she performed well. Silverman developed a funny persona of a dumb girl who says and does politically incorrect things because she doesn’t know that you aren’t supposed to, for example.
Silverman’s primary innovation is that she stumbled upon a comedy hack: namely, that women can get away with doing “dark” and “edgy” humor more than men can. A lot of Silverman’s early dark material would have come off as too “mean” if it had been done by a man. It would have been seen as punching down, and the audience would wonder if it was a joke or serious. But if the same material is done by a cute girl, it’s more obvious that she’s just being silly and the audience feels more comfortable laughing at it. This hack served as the blueprint for a million “cute girl tells edgy/dark jokes” comediennes who came after.
Turning to the Dark Side
Heading into the Obama era, Gen X was moving into middle age and the youth culture began focusing increasingly on millennials like Amy Schumer, who is basically Sarah Silverman but a decade younger, blonde, and more gentile-presenting.
The Obama years also saw the rise of woke culture, and Silverman’s brand of comedic nihilism became deeply unfashionable. It was no longer cool not to care. Suddenly, all the cool kids were caring about stuff. Silverman’s no-holds-barred “offend everyone” free-for-all was grossly out of step in this new age of safe spaces and trigger warnings.
While The Sarah Silverman Program got good ratings and rave reviews for three seasons, Comedy Central canceled it in 2010, citing budgetary concerns. Three years later, Inside Amy Schumer premiered on the same network. Only five years after the release of her breakthrough Jesus Is Magic, Silverman was already being eclipsed by her own imitators.
Schumer spent the early part of her career as a Silverman knockoff. She was a frequent guest on FOX News’ Red Eye, where she cultivated an image as a kind of guy’s gal, your friend’s cool kid sister — the kind of girl you could hang out with as if she were one the guys. She’s not one of those who freak out over every little thing.
This is why, as distasteful as Sarah Silverman is, she is not nearly as repellent as Amy Schumer. Silverman betrayed her fans by going woke for reasons I will explain later, but unlike her, Schumer actually pandered to the Right on her way to the top. If you are a struggling comedian, then getting on FOX News, even at midnight, is a huge break. She took that break and ran with it. Even when she was performing in Nowheresville, Iowa, people came out to see her because they had seen her on FOX News. This makes Schumer’s betrayal that much worse.
After rebranding as an SJW feminist, Schumer explained in a 2015 interview that in her earlier career she had merely playing the character of a conservative:
I used to play a character onstage — really irreverent, kind of a racist. I played this very privileged, white Republican chick. And that’s not who I am. I did not grow up with money. I’m a Democrat.
She literally retconned the first half of her career.
Silverman was always a one-trick pony as a comedian, but now found herself in a cultural landscape where that one trick had essentially been outlawed. With that avenue closed, she aimed for respectability.
Silverman disavowed her earlier work, claiming that she had “learned more” since her early and edgy days — but apparently has no intention of donating any of the money she made from that to charity.
Worse yet, Silverman sided with SJWs against her fellow comedians. In 2015, Jerry Seinfeld made news when he announced that he would no longer be performing at colleges, as political correctness had made college students humorless and offended by everything. Silverman chipped in on the controversy and started singing the praises of political correctness:
To a degree, everyone’s going to be offended by something, so you can’t just decide on your material based on not offending anyone. But, I do think it’s important, as a comedian, as a human, to change with the times. To change with new information. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with changing with the times. I think it’s a sign of being old when you are put off by that.
Silverman claims that she resisted giving up the word “gay” as a pejorative until she thought, “What am I fighting? I have become the guy from 50 years ago who says, ‘I say colored, I have colored friends!’”
And as for those college kids, Silverman said, “You have to listen to the college-aged because they lead the revolution. They’re pretty much always on the right side of history.”
That was Silverman’s “Et tu, Brute?” moment. She made her reputation by violating every social piety and respecting no boundaries. Her comedy was about challenging the audience. She more than any other comedian should have been on the forefront of defending free expression. Instead, she told people to bow to the mob. She made it to the top, and is now lifting up the ladder.
Her play for respectability nevertheless worked. Silverman was a presenter at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, where she memorably scolded the Bernie supporters for not backing Hillary:
In December 2017, Silverman’s comedy program I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman debuted on Hulu. After several failed attempts at becoming a serious dramatic actress, this was supposed to represent a return to Silverman’s earlier style, reviving her dumb girl persona, but this time the show was pure propaganda, totally woke, and explicitly anti-white:
The “my fellow whites” were flying hot and heavy in the above clip.
Going full Jew, she did a monologue on nationalism where she said, without the slightest trace of irony, that the sight of the American flag frightens her and that she had to be schooled by her sister — who lives in Israel — as to why nationalism is bad for Jews:
The new series was aired in the months after Charlottesville, and it shows. Christian Picciolini was one of the program’s first guests:
At the same time that she was doing this, Silverman became the center of a viral news story. David Weissman was supposedly a Trump-supporting US Army combat vet. One day, Weissman started trolling Sarah Silverman on Twitter, but instead of reacting with hostility, Silverman responded with compassion and concern. After exchanging tweets on Twitter, Weissman realized that he had been wrong about everything all along and became a liberal.
The story went viral, and Weissman used the sudden attention to launch a new career as an e-celeb. With his gimmick of being the ex-Trump supporter who was shown the light through the love and compassion of a liberal, Weissman racked up 350,000 followers on Twitter. The story got picked up by all the liberal outlets, and Weissman even wrote half-a-dozen articles for the Jewish Daily Forward.
It’s hard to hear the Weissman story and not immediately assume that it was a staged publicity stunt. It made Silverman look like she has God-like powers of de-radicalization, besides which it is too perfect to be real. It’s too Hollywood. You’ve got the hateful Right-winger who is really only hateful because he hasn’t been shown enough love in his life. No one ever cared about him before, but once a liberal actually made an effort to reach out to him, all his hatred melted away and he instantly became a liberal. It’s a perfect little liberal fairy tale of love conquering hate that we’ve seen a million times in Hollywood movies.
Then it came out that Weissman lived in Israel, and it was clear to everyone on our side that it was an op. But he is actually a US Army vet, and he had a conservative social media history going back three years before his encounter with Silverman, so if it was an op, it was a long one in the making.
If we dig deeper, however, we learn that he was a liberal before that. And even his conservative posts present the most basic-bitch borderline strawman conservative arguments, such as “There’s no such thing as ‘free health care’ because someone has to pay for it.” He was more of a caricature of a conservative. If there was a liberal with no contact with Right-wing ideas aside from their Limbaugh-listening uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who tried to go undercover online as a conservative, he would end up sounding a lot like David Weissman.
Weissman also claimed to be deeply involved with high-level figures in the Democratic Party. Skeptical liberal journalists asked around and found that no one actually knew him. It also turned out that while Weissman was indeed in the Army, he was a desk jockey and never saw combat. It has also been alleged that he took out a huge loan in his wife’s name and then fled Israel.
He’s also not very good at taking criticism. Whenever someone confronts Weissman about his lies and inconsistencies, he merely accuses them of “attacking veterans.” He recently deleted his Twitter altogether.
Recent reporting has led me to believe that it is possible that Weissman is in fact just a lucky sociopath who won the internet lottery rather than an agent, however. It may be that he simply saw how much attention he could get by switching sides and becoming the hero of every liberal’s fairy tale.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
18 comments
“After rebranding as an SJW feminist, Schumer explained in a 2015 interview that in her earlier career she had merely playing the character of a conservative:
….,’I used to play a character onstage — really irreverent, kind of a racist. I played this very privileged, white Republican chick. And that’s not who I am. I did not grow up with money. I’m a Democrat.’”
I mean, She’s Chuck’s niece. Anyone with a brain should have know better.
This sort of thing ultimately confirms the Uniparty theory.
“I did not grow up with money. I’m a Democrat.”
Maybe she’s only playing being a SJW as well. I mean, that line made me laugh for several moments. How could anyone be that un-self aware? I mean, forget Chuck Schumer, have you seen Nancy Pelosi’s refrigerator? It’s like Mark Twain’s “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” It also conforms to Norm MacDonald’s definition of the “perfect joke,” where the punchline IS the set-up.
Silverman is a sick antichristian psychopath…with NO talent..Holocaust Traumatized..paranoi…She accused a auidence fan of making swatsticas signs …he was covering his sneezing…the lady is sick…
Silverman’s stage-fright took a turn for the worse when she gazed over the footlights one night and saw the audience was composed entirely of Adolfs. Springtime for Hitler in reverse. She should have gotten an straight-armed ovation. She likely has fantasies of performing a revue in a camp a la The Day the Clown Cried (1972).
A walking one-woman justification for anti-semitism.
Never found Silverman funny. Ever. A bed-wetter until she was old enough to drive, she always just struck me as somebody with daddy issues looking for his approbation by making him laugh, the ‘naughty potty-mouth for attention’ archetype. Sad wee cow. This Damascean ‘conversion’ to ‘caring’ does not surprise me in the least, either, for two reasons:
1) It’s the only thing to do these days for once-‘edgy’ comedians to make money. Just ask the Australian Jim Jefferies. He arrived in America just in time to be comprehensively emasculated by the liberal audience he had to pander to for his bread and butter, especially after he got scared shitless by the reaction to a gun control skit he did from masturbating gun nuts. He used to be hilarious, and now is no longer funny. At all. ‘Comedy’ these days now mostly consists, Dave Chapelle aside, of deranged lesbian lunatics like Hannah Gadsby (and bless Chapelle for making a condition of his talking to trans wankers that they have to say that she is not funny – only a rich black man could state the truth so boldly and baldly in the current cultural environment) screaming didactic hate at the men in the audience. Laughs and entertainment are a dead concept, especially from female ‘comics.’ Listen up and learn, white scum!
2) Silverman is Jewish. It runs right through her schtick. Liberal Jews and lapsed Catholics like going to extremes to show how much they have ‘broken free’ of the religions they were brought up in. But it’s never real. They have basically based their entire careers on their reaction to their repressive religions, rebelling against their appalled mommy and daddy. They always – ALWAYS go back to that religion later on, when they get older and more comfortable in their skins – or too old to keep acting the arsehole. Look at flaky theatrical characters like Merrill ‘Peaches’ Nisker and Sandra Bernhardt and Sacha Baron Cohen for other examples of this in the Jewish corner. Jefferies himself is Catholic.
Sarah Silverman is a joke. And that joke has never, ever been funny. And never will be. If you look in the dictionary for the words ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘unfunny’ and ‘slimy clown with daddy issues’ (admittedly the latter depends what version of the OED you read) it shows you a picture of her. Flush her and her shitty turncoat faux-caring crap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igILhbNWvlk
Silverman is not remotely funny but as offensive as her “humor” may be there is nothing she has done which was more offensive than her full nude shower scene in the movie Take This Waltz, my eyes still haven’t recovered and it’s been about 10 years
Sandra Bernhard was an offensively in-your-face rude Jewess comedienne back in the nineteen eighties – she appeared opposite Robert deNiro in The King of Comedy and Bruce Willis in his Hudson Hawk movie of the early nineties and claimed on t.v. (later presented by her as a joke) to have been the lesbian lover of Madonna. So Silverman’s act wasn’t original.
Also see: Bette Midler.
Part 1? This person really isn’t worth all that much attention, especially when attention is all she really craves.
I was thinking that same thing. I don’t find her to be that particularly mysterious.
Also, not sure where this came from:
“Silverman’s primary innovation is that she stumbled upon a comedy hack: namely, that women can get away with doing “dark” and “edgy” humor more than men can. A lot of Silverman’s early dark material would have come off as too “mean” if it had been done by a man. It would have been seen as punching down, and the audience would wonder if it was a joke or serious. But if the same material is done by a cute girl, it’s more obvious that she’s just being silly and the audience feels more comfortable laughing at it. This hack served as the blueprint for a million “cute girl tells edgy/dark jokes” comediennes who came after.”
I’ve never found this to be remotely true. Dark, edgy humor has been done quite successfully by male comics throughout the decades and, until the last ten years or so, they have been getting away with it just fine. In fact, they’re actually better at it because they come off as natural, whereas female comics come off like they’re just trying to shock and get a reaction. Of course, “dark” and “edgy” are relative terms. Even comics most people find “transgressive” like Bill Burr or Bill Hicks or George Carlin are/were still pushing the dominant narrative, just in a different manner.
I didn’t say women do dark humor better. I said that they are more capable of getting away with dark humor.
A woman telling a joke about raping a child is going to hit people differently than a man who told the same joke. With the man, some people in the audience will think “why would he write a joke like that? Is he a pedophile?” This will make the room uncomfortable. But female pedophiles are pretty rare so they assume the girl is just trying to be outrageous.
I would describe Carlin, Burr, and Hicks more as cynical than dark. They’re not smiley faced but they are not exactly morbid either.
Now, Anthony Jeselnik is great at dark humor but he used to bomb onstage all the time before he got famous. Once he was famous, people knew being dark was his shtick but when he was starting out, a lot of people were like “WTF is this?” Sarah Silverman supposedly discovered Jeselnik and he wrote her monolog for the MTV video awards.
Lenny Bruce would’ve told her to grow a pair.
Lenny would’ve asked her for some smack. 🙂
A lot of celebrities will say that they grew up without money, wether it’s true or not. These comedians are trying to save their career and future prospects for income by going woke, just like a lot of generals and admirals, and corporate executives. We don’t know if someone behind the scenes in management told them to do this or if they made the decision on their own. If they did it on their own, it’s possible that they are doing this subconsciously and not completely aware of their actions, not that defends it. Whites are being regulated to the bottom of society, while blacks and everyone else are being elevated to the top, even if it’s artificial. These women are still in the high school stage. What type of ideology is currently fashionable and trendy, what would my friends think? If I suck up to the jocks and bullies, maybe I will be popular to and won’t be targeted, but they eventually will. Complaining about discrimination against Jews and saying that you grew up without money is just an appeal for popularity and an attempt to deflect attention from things they have said and done, it won’t work in the long run. The left will turn against them over something, just like they did Rosanne Bar. Whites need to divorce themselves from pop culture, at least some aspects of it.
Is that an actual tweet of hers? She had her moments. One of my favorite one liners of hers was, “I don’t like sleeping with Mexican men, they give me diarrhea.”
There’s a difference between lovingly pointing out the absurdity of something, and cruelly mocking it. Norm MacDonald pointed this out by saying that a good impersonator likes his subject. Silverman, Stern, Schumer, Sacha Baron Cohen, are all decidedly in the “mocking” category.
This is okay if the thing being mocked deserves it. But in the US, normies allowed the things they actually care about to be mocked in this fashion, and were disarmed by “can’t you take a joke?”
Well, in some cases, you shouldn’t take the joke.
What exactly was the purpose of this article?? Celebrity gossip trash? A critique of the failings of female comics?
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Edit your comment