Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (45 page)

Judd:
Yeah.

Sandra:
I’m more interested in what I’m doing—I’ve been through that already. I’m beyond that. Christ, if I was still at that point, I never would have gotten the film.

Judd:
So you think you have it down?

Sandra:
Oh no, I don’t have it down. But I’m certainly doing what I believe is true to what I think, and honest. I mean, I believe that people are talking about me. And I can’t think of anybody who impresses me right now as much as I impress myself.

I’ve known Sarah Silverman since she moved to California to do standup when she was twenty-one years old. Back then, she was the young, hilarious girl who was from the same town in New Hampshire as my friend and roommate, Adam Sandler. That always seemed so weird to me, the idea that two brilliantly funny people could come from the same small town.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with her in the intervening years, in a work capacity (we worked together at
The Larry Sanders Show
, where I was a writer and she an actor playing a writer), and in the deeply competitive world of Garry Shandling’s weekly pickup basketball games (where I have tried and failed to keep her out of the paint). Not only is she way funnier than I am—I feel pretty comfortable calling her one of the most essential comedic minds of her generation—but she’s also way better than me at basketball.

Judd Apatow:
I was thinking recently about the first time I met you. You were so young.

Sarah Silverman:
That was back when I was, like, really doing stand-up.

Judd:
Did you go straight from high school into the clubs?

Sarah:
Yeah. When I was seventeen, I went to summer school in Boston. I knew I wanted to be a stand-up but I’d only done it at high school assemblies and stuff. But I went up at open-mic night at Stitches when it was on Mass. Ave., and that was the first time I ever did stand-up. It was my third year of high school. I remember the comedian who was onstage when I first went in to scope it out, too. Wendy Liebman.

Judd:
Wow.

Sarah:
And she did two jokes. I completely remember that night. I have this sense memory of walking through the doors and the first thing I heard was her saying, “Someone thought I was Lady Di, but it turned out that they were just saying, ‘Lady, die.’ ” And then the other one was—wow, I ruined that joke.

Judd:
I was interested in comedy from a really young age, too. As a ten-year-old kid, I was watching a scary amount of Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore.

Sarah:
Oh, my mother always loved Dinah Shore because she said she did her own hair. She thought that made her so down-to-earth.

Judd:
What drew you to try comedy, though? Why did you like it so much?

Sarah:
My dad taught me swears when I was a toddler and I saw, at a really early age, that if I shocked people, I would get approval, and it made my arms itch with glee. I got addicted to it. It became this source of power in a totally powerless life.

Judd:
Did your dad get a kick out of it?

Sarah:
He thought it was funny to teach his three-year-old daughter swears.

Judd:
What do your parents do for a living?

Sarah:
My dad is alive. I always say, “He was a retailer,” and then people go, “Oh, did he die?” But no, he’s just retired. His dream was to be a writer—and he wrote all these books that he self-published when he retired—but he was always a retailer. He owned a store called Crazy Sophie’s Factory Outlet. And he did his own commercials. I have a bunch of them. They’re amazing. He has such a thick New England accent. You can’t understand a thing he’s saying. He’s like, “When I see the prices at the mall, I just want to vomit! Hey, I’m Crazy Donald!” He was Crazy Donald, like Crazy Eddie, only in New Hampshire.

Judd:
That must have been a big deal, in a small town in New Hampshire, growing up with your dad doing commercials.

Sarah:
Yeah, he was always on the radio waves talking about his sales, and jean brands that you never heard of, like Unicorn. And my mom was like Shelley Long in
Cheers.
Diction is very important to her. She says, like,
wh
en and
wh
ere. She was the opposite of my dad.

Judd:
Did they stay married?

Sarah:
No, they got divorced when I was like six and a half, but I was thrilled because they hated each other. I mean, I never saw a loving glance or a smile between them until long after they were divorced. Now they’re close. They’re like army buddies, you know. Like siblings. My mom is sickly and my stepmother checks in on her almost every day.

Judd:
So your dad remarried and his wife is close with your mom?

Sarah:
Yeah, they’re all close. My mom remarried, too. They both found the loves of their lives, so I was able to see—unfortunately, not in my formative years—but I was eventually able to see what a loving marriage can look like.

Judd:
Do you like trace your sensibility to anything specific other than your dad being amused by watching you shock people?

Sarah:
I never consciously set out to talk about taboos or anything like that. That was just what the household I grew up in was like. There weren’t any boundaries or a sense of, like, “Maybe let’s not say that in front of the kids.” It was all out there, you know, and I didn’t know better. I mean, honestly, a lot of the human etiquette I learned in life I learned from, like, thank-you notes and dating Jimmy Kimmel. I have great parents and they both taught me great things, but it was just different. My formative years were boundaryless.

Judd:
But was there a core of morality to it?

Sarah:
Oh yeah, definitely. We had no religion at all but we were Jews in New Hampshire, and my sister—who is now a rabbi—said it best: We were like the only Jews in Bedford, New Hampshire, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of associated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor, that it goes to important things for everybody. We were never to complain about that shit, or
be all about keeping your money or whatever. Now I look around and realize that was special. Money is seen as such a positive thing now, we try to get as much of it as we can and that’s okay because it equals success. It’s sad.

Judd:
My parents didn’t talk about religion, either. And then, out of the blue, my brother became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel. I always think it’s funny how, in the same family, one person looks for answers through comedy and another through religion.

Sarah:
My sister and I are so close, and so different. I don’t have religion at all. Love and science are my religion. And Kermit the Frog and Mister Rogers.

Judd:
That’s so funny, because whenever I need to equalize myself and bawl my eyes out, I will go online and watch Jim Henson’s funeral on YouTube.

Sarah:
I’ve got to see that. I will not be able to keep it together because, honestly, I’ll just fucking sing “It’s Not Easy Being Green” or “Rainbow Connection” and cry.

Judd:
That’s what I do late at night. I just go down the Mister Rogers–Jim Henson wormhole of tears. But those two guys are a good religion. How does your sister talk about Judaism?

Sarah:
It’s funny because sometimes I’ll get cunty with her and I’ll be like, “Oh, so you believe there’s a man in the sky?” I just can’t get my head around it, you know. And she’ll go, “Well, I like to live my life as though there is one.” And I’m just like, “Oh, you’re beautiful.”

Judd:
Why can’t you get your head around it?

Sarah:
I can be cynical. But I don’t think of myself, at my core, as cynical. So much of it is location. Like, who is Muslim? Who is a Jew? Who is a Catholic? Who is a Christian? Who’s Buddhist? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is where you happen to be born. So how can one be right and another be wrong? It seems pretty clear to me that it’s a coping mechanism for people who cannot handle the not knowing of things. I am okay knowing I will never be able to comprehend the world.

Judd:
I wish I could convince myself to believe the way your sister believes because I’m so exhausted from not believing.

Sarah:
I actually don’t think that she believes in God, necessarily. I think she just loves the ritual of religion and finding meaning in every little thing. She loves living her life that way.

Judd:
Do you think she believes that God is involved in people’s lives?

Sarah:
Yeah. But she isn’t one of those “Oh, let’s pray for this tumor to go away” people. You know what I mean? She just loves the ritual of finding meaning in everything. I don’t know. I don’t think she believes in, like, a male God or anything. She’s a major feminist, a liberal hippy-dippy granola rabbi.

Judd:
She doesn’t believe in a God that is actively involved in people’s lives, making choices?

Sarah:
She doesn’t believe that God is rooting for the Giants and not the Patriots. She’s not fucking ridiculous.

Judd:
I’m jealous of those people. I plan on tricking myself into believing in religion one of these days. I’m going to pick a religion and then hypnotize myself.

Sarah:
When the rest of my family is in a crazy, neurotic tizzy, she’ll be like, “It will work out.” You know.

Judd:
I always feel that my only connection to anything spiritual—and this might be sad—is when a joke comes to me. In that moment, I feel a different kind of connection than I do during the rest of the day.

Sarah:
Because you can’t make it happen. I mean, I have to sit and sit and work on my jokes. And it’s just such torture for me and I think,
Why don’t I love this?
Sitting down and fixing my shitty jokes should be my passion. But it’s torture.

Judd:
Do you put time aside to write?

Sarah:
No, but when I do, it always pays off. I don’t know why I’m so afraid of setting aside twenty minutes of sitting-down time. It’s always fruitful, you know. But I just fight it so much.

Judd:
Seinfeld said he sits and writes for two hours every single day.

Sarah:
Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they’re just that incredible combination of funny and not lazy, which is very rare and special and completely failure proof. I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris screamed at me—in a loving way, but still. He was like, “You need to do two hundred shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even
think
about recording a special!” And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that’s okay.

Judd:
Who are the comics you look up to? Who’s had the greatest impact on you, would you say?

Sarah:
Early on, Garry Shandling. When I first started hanging out with him, he was always so giving of what he knows and what he learned. I definitely learned to embrace the quiet moments onstage from him—relaxing and not fighting with the crowd, not raising your voice, not ever trying to win them over. I also started out with Louis [C.K.] and David Attell. I remember the very first time Louis saw me. I was just starting and I had this affectation, where I would pull the mic away from my mouth. And he was like, “You shouldn’t do that. It looks weird and it’s a bad habit to get into.” And so I stopped, you know.

Judd:
What is it like, at this point of your career, to look back on what all these people you came up with have accomplished?

Sarah:
It’s so exciting. You know, everyone’s got their own velocity. Life goes at different speeds and there’s no real time frame with comedy. Louis has been brilliant for thirty years, but it has been so exciting to see, these past five years, the world getting Louis fever. On the flip side of that, there is the waste, the ones you know that were everyone’s favorite—you know, there’s so many times I will find myself talking to someone, “No, no, you don’t understand, he was the king, he was everyone’s favorite comic,” and people only see a guy as washed up, with no place to live, who can’t get his shit together. It’s so frustrating. You just want people to understand. Like I said about Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they’re a great combination of brilliance and hard work. There are people who are brilliant and don’t
work hard, and there are people that are brilliant and sabotage themselves, and both are just so hard to see. Every once in a while, you forget there’s nothing you can do about it, and so you scramble around, trying to get something going for them, and then you come to the realization that they’ll never let it happen. You don’t get what you want, you get what you think you deserve. With people like that, they’re just not going to let themselves succeed.

Judd:
And you end up with survivor’s guilt.

Sarah:
It’s awful. You must know comics in their sixties who didn’t parlay their act into writing or acting or producing, and so they’re just fucked. Even the cruise ships don’t want them anymore.

Judd:
Yeah. I feel like it’s a miracle when you can separate yourself from the pack enough to make a real living.

Sarah:
Comedy is like alcoholism. You’re surrounded by people who are getting high all day, fucking around, and just being comics—and time passes, you know.

Judd:
None of us have any other skill to fall back on.

Sarah:
Yeah, exactly. There are a couple of comics that—like, I have a friend who just found a whole new career as the old black man in a bunch of commercials, and it’s exciting for him. Like, he can buy people drinks and stuff and it’s nice. But, you know, he didn’t have teeth for a while. I mean, you forget that comics, for the most part, don’t pay any attention to—I mean, with women comics it tends to be different because we’re not disgusting pigs, but a lot of comics don’t even know to like floss and brush their teeth, you know what I mean? And their teeth, I have to tell you: There was a time where I just bought a ton of dental care products and gave them out to my guy comic friends because they didn’t know any better. I mean, I don’t know how they get pussy. When I drive them in my car, and they get out, I have to Febreze the whole area. It’s insane. Like hygiene is just something you don’t need if you’re fly enough to get girls or something. But it’s bad and death creeps in through the gums.