A word—okay, a paragraph—about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in DailyExpertNews). If you thought Silverman might have outgrown her affinity for youthful, scatological humor after half a century, you’d be wrong. “She can’t smile when you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, with her hands around her mouth.
She never wanted to be an artist, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends as a child, Sarah would jump out of a closet and play costumed characters to entertain them.
And her family supported her in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow’ from ‘Annie,'” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be afraid of singing or performing for anyone at any time.”
When, as a very young child, Silverman let go of the series of curse words her father taught her—a cherub with inky black curtain bangs, working blue—“I would get this wild adult approval, in spite of herself,” she said. “It felt so good, my arms are itching with joy, and I got hooked on that.”
It wasn’t until she wrote her memoir that she connected the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my stand-up, especially in the beginning, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and total crap.” She used misguided racial slurs to prove a point, which she now says she regrets – she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel to have to change,” she said.
The only word Silverman whispered during our three-hour lunch was “menopause.”
When pressed – no, she begged – she said she would write on that subject, although she was still working out the terms. (“There’s no feminine word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation that some people don’t even realize they can do it. The truth! It’s really wild.”