Someone You Love review - I owe Silverman a good one but I can’t give it - The Jewish Chronicle

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.

SarahSilverman-SomeoneYouLove 01

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.