Someone You Love
Sky Comedy | ★★✩✩✩
They say you should never meet your heroes, but when I met Sarah Silverman a few years ago, the only person I was disappointed in was me.
Flustered by the occasion and desperate to make an impression, I said something so cringeworthy and inappropriate I blush with shame to recall it.
Sarah had the kindness and good grace to ignore the comment, so if I owe anyone a good review, it’s her.
Her new HBO special Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love, shown here on Sky Comedy, should then have elicited an easy five stars from me.
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Sarah Silverman (Photo: HBO)
But this time, and it pains me to write it, it wasn’t me who was the disappointment. And being pathetic (once again), I know I’m most likely being unfair.
Look, she’s funny. The show’s funny. So what’s my problem? Expectation that’s what.
I wish I could articulate fully just how much a bootleg audio of her club set blew me away, over two decades ago. Back then, Silverman was totally unknown over here.
But I listened over and over again because she encapsulated everything I wanted to be as I started my own journey as a comic. Brave. Pithy. Outrageous. Relevant. Quotable. Playful. Biting. And of course, so very very funny. Oh, yeah, and Jewish.
This special opens with a little skit of imagined children wishing her luck before she steps on stage.
A little boy, dressed up as a bearded Orthodox Jew, says, “You’re a disgrace to your people.” Of course she’s not. She’s one of the best of us, following a long tradition of using humour to explore what it means to be Jewish, and vice versa.
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The Someone You Love poster (Photo: HBO)
Her reward is a Boston audience packed with Jews, making, as she quips, the place a target for anyone who wants to wipe out the local community.
Their reward are a lot of Jewish-flavoured jokes, where even the word “mitzvah” gets a laugh when used as a punchline. Jewish porn, the Holocaust, Hitler, this is Jackie Mason on steroids.
After the shock, there’s usually follows a valid point, but this feels like having her cake and eating it. Even Jewish toiletry habits are turned into a slight dig at identity politics, an excuse, it feels, to revel in her second favourite topic of scatological humour.
One problem is that a lot of this material feels straight outta her first show Jesus is Magic and the material that is not feels a step back. And what is missing is any sense of danger. Millennial Silverman would push and push to find the right lines.
People may argue that comedy has changed, but on the evidence here, it is worse for it. By restricting yourself to “acceptable” targets, essentially your own people, the religious right, and Nazis, Silverman plays it safe in a world she once helped define.
