Comedian Sarah Silverman admits that she has chosen "to build a career on shock and profanity." And while she doesn't say so directly, her memoir is clearly aimed at justifying both her career path and her boundary-trampling brand of humor. An early influence was her father, Donald, owner of Crazy Sophie's Factory Outlet in small-town New Hampshire. When she was only three, he taught her how to swear a blue streak in public. At his cue, she even told her grandmother to shove some brownies in a very inappropriate place. The guests present laughed uproariously and swept away her grandmother's anger. Out of shock came laughter, a lesson Silverman learned for life. "The reactions were verbally disapproving but there was an unmistakable encouragement under it all. No meant yes."

At five years of age Silverman would announce to strangers: "I love tampons." The success of her joking swelled her pride and made her eager for "more more more push push push." But when she joked about her deceased baby brother, strangled in a crib's faulty mattress frame, her family did not laugh. Silverman discovered the other side of laughter's coin, that boundary-pushing carries the risk of bruising and breaking relationships. "Four words swam in my head—the most grown-up arrangement so far in my five years: What have I done?"

Silverman's moments of self-awareness help the book rise, from time to time, above its general crudeness. She comments, for example, on the comedian's place in society: "Comedians are almost universally tortured, and not even redeemed like normal writers are by being 'deep.'" As a comic writer, Silverman is indeed no Eudora Welty. The haphazard organization of the book reflects the anecdotal nature of stand-up comedy. When she is not lewd, her style is breezily pleasant at best. Yet, as with the best stand-up, Silverman knows how to use individual sorrow as the source of pity and laughter.

As the book's title boldly acknowledges, Silverman's personal torture was her struggle with bedwetting, a condition she endured well into her teenage years. Her diary noted nights as either "wet" or "dry." At an eighth-grade camp-out, she secretly slipped on the diapers she had hidden in her sleeping bag. It's not surprising she couldn't bear to go to school and suffered from depression. Although she doesn't go into the details, her parents divorced around that time. Soon Silverman was taking a whopping 16 Xanax anti-depressant pills each day. Fortunately, a doctor weaned her off the drug, and her depression and bedwetting ceased.

Such teenage sufferings help to understand Silverman's fearlessness as a comedian. Already in high school she would not hesitate to tell jokes at assemblies. "My early trauma was a gift, it turned out, in a vocation where your best headspace is feeling that you have nothing to lose." After high school, she studied at NYU—or rather she enrolled at NYU and hung out at New York comedy clubs, hoping for a break at open-mic sessions. She found kindred spirits among other young comedians, who shared her ambitions and humor: "Life at that time was all about who would push it the farthest, who could be the most uncivilized just for a laugh."

When Silverman was about to begin her second year of college, her father suggested she drop out. He offered to pay her rent and utilities for three years so she could pursue her dream of becoming a professional comedian. In her characteristically self-mocking style, Silverman wonders about the wisdom of this offer, and her acceptance of it: "If I'd stayed in college, and been really inspired by, say, a biology class, I might have become a world-renowned entomologist. Right now I could be saving the Rocky Mountains from pine beetle devastation. But instead: fart jokes and blasphemy. Smooth move, Dad."

Silverman's tongue-in-cheek comment raises a serious question, one at the heart of most contemporary comedy. Does her brand of humor serve any purpose beyond causing some to laugh and offending others? Silverman says her offensive jokes are meant to function as satire, pointing out the ills of contemporary society: "adopting a persona at once ignorant and arrogant allowed me to say what I didn't mean, even preach the opposite of what I believed. For me, it was a funny way to be sincere." But she uses a considerable number of pages to justify the times her irony has been misunderstood. One joke in particular, told on the TV show Late Night with Conan O'Brian, got Silverman into a fair amount of trouble (note—the epithet she used is omitted):

I got a jury duty form in the mail, and I don't wanna do jury duty. So my friend said, "Write something really racist on the form so they don't pick you, like 'I hate ******'" I was, like, Jeez—I don't want people to think I'm racist, I just wanna get out of jury duty. So I filled out the form and I wrote "I love ******."

Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, found her joke to be racist and took NBC to task. Silverman was banned from the network. In her memoir, she accuses Aoki of narrow-mindedness: "in recent decades, an effective cultural crusader requires a more nuanced perception of irony and context."

Whenever one of my colleagues teaches a comic literary text in class, she will ask her students to take the perspective of the person who is at the receiving end of the joke. Is the joke fair, or is it cruel and even exploitative? Silverman appears to be unable to make such a shift in perspective. She bemoans the way TV and cable networks apply rating restrictions: "There is no algorithm for determining what is offensive. What qualifies as 'offensive' is wildly specific to every individual's weird little brain." Thus she brandishes the moral relativity card to absolve herself.

Silverman often makes fun of being Jewish, as if it were a mere punchline. I have not always understood the point of such joking, a concern others must share, since Silverman's editor asked her to add a chapter on the topic. Once again she uses her personal history to justify her joking. Although raised an agnostic, she began to tell "Jew jokes" as a child to defend herself in an environment where Jews were a minority. "Joking about my differences seemed to put the people around me at ease." Yet why continue with such joking as an adult professional comedian? Silverman summarizes her current attitude:

Whether I like it or not, I am, at least from the world's point of view, Jewish. And yes, I admit I draw on my Jewishness when comedically advantageous, though nothing I have ever done, or plan to do, will be about advancing any kind of Jewish agenda. But as it turns out, I cannot have it both ways. Because I have accepted being identified as Jewish, I have accepted the responsibilities, limitations, and consequences.

The chief limitation is that many consider her jokes only "through the filter of [her] Jewishness." One result is that she receives anti-Semitic hate mail, of which she provides some chilling extracts. She doesn't spell out her sense of the responsibilities she bears as a Jewish comedian, other than citing her 2008 video that invited Jewish grandkids to convince their reluctant grandparents in Florida to vote for Barack Obama.

Such musings suggest that Silverman probably wonders, more than she would admit, about the ethics of humor. You can't joke about your dead baby brother and not expect some consequence. You can't repeat racist epithets or make fun of your ethnicity and think everyone will accept the joking as "irony." Indeed, Silverman acknowledges the (ironic) problem of this comedic formula: "once the irony becomes the audience's expectation, the surprise is gone." A possible solution to this problem, one Silverman seems to prefer, is to shock viewers back into laughter with forever raunchier and otherwise more offensive material. Yet, given the self-awareness shown in her memoir, Silverman certainly has the ability to take another path, going well beyond fart jokes and blasphemy, one that would surprise her audience with a deeper, mature sense of humor.

Otto Selles is professor of French at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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