Sarah Silverman

Comedian Sarah Silverman had an interesting childhood, growing up Jewish in New Hampshire. As the youngest of five girls she always used humor for attention and to mask the fact that she regularly wet the bed until high school, as well as the anxiety and depression it caused (or was caused by). She fell in love with New York when she visited an older sister there, and then moved herself at 18 to join the comedy scene. She spent a season on Saturday Night Live, wrote and starred in a sitcom show more about her life, told some risky jokes that she may or may not have later regretted, and worked on the election campaign of President Barack Obama.

I picked up this ancient (2010) memoir because I recently saw a stage musical adaptation of it and really loved it. The musical does a great job of picking out the interesting, meaningful, and emotional early parts of the memoir and leaving behind all of the other parts, which are quite bad. Sarah’s family story is very funny (her father owned a discount women’s clothing store and made his own local tv ads, her mother was the voice of the local movie theater because she complained about the bad diction in their recordings) and very sad (an infant brother died in a crib accident while most of the family was on vacation, after her divorce her mother developed severe agoraphobia). After she’s on her own things quickly go downhill. Aside from lengthy chapters on her deep friendships with comedians we know now to be sex pests, she spends a lot of time defending jokes that ranged from unfunny to unfunny-and-obviously-offensive. Her comedy at the time was very ‘punching down is fine as long as you’re punching at everyone’, as was the style at the time. She spends a long time defending a 2007 joke involving a racial slur that got her banned from some TV shows for awhile and is not apologetic about it (though I know she is in the current day). The book picks up a bit at the end, when she talks about some major fashion mistakes she made (the early ‘00s were rough, I know) and how thrilled she was to work on a campaign video for the 2008 election.

Definitely skip this memoir, but check out the musical The Bedwetter if you ever have a chance to see it. It’s the perfect distillation of her humor, without all of the bad stuff. show less

Road trip! 2,500-mile round trip taking my daughter to college and driving back alone calls for a whole lot of audiobooks. (2 of 7)

Hilarious! I loved watching The Sarah Silverman Program and her various stand-up specials, and this audiobook is just as great. Her chapter titles alone set off giant rolls of laughter.

Silverman's style of humor is not for everyone as she pushes boundaries way past the realm of good taste. Her chapter on defense of a joke involving ethnic slurs was discomfiting show more even as it raised some legitimate if debatable points about humor and free speech. show less

I finished reading this autobiography - true story! - while waiting my turn at the urologist's office. I always bring reading material. You never know how much time it will take for the doctor to put his finger on exactly what is wrong with the prostate of the fellow in front of you. Anyhow, I thought it was a witty choice for the waiting room. But many of my fellow patients - elderly East Ohioans with walkers - likely had never heard of Sarah Silverman. No doubt I was telling them more than show more they wanted to know...deeply engrossed, as I was, in The Bedwetter.

I was pretty much in love with Ms. Silverman before reading her bio. Now? I plan to stalker her! (just kidding) She's a physical doppelganger for a Jewish girlfriend I loved madly back in the 1970's. Uncannily, their names are similar, alliterative and share the same root.. Even their humor... for example, I cite the time my friend's dog, Rufus, mistook her used tampon for a milkbone - a fact we discovered only days later when Ruuufus appeared to be turning into a white furry firecracker with a string fuse just below his tail.

If you're a fan of Sarah Silverman, may God help you and have mercy on your soul...no seriously, I'm joking...you will enjoy this book. She's precious. She's cute. She's absolutely disgusting. And it's not her fault, she was molested by Andrew Dice Clay...no seriously, I'm joking..SHE molested him. No really...you will enjoy her humiliating tale upon tale of bedwetting. The time she almost killed a future US Senator with a pencil. Her epic Struggles with Editors, Censors, Publishers, and legions of decencies. The Eternal Question of poetic judgement "To Pee or To Pee-pee which sounds better?". The Diary that talks back. And, last but not least, a long loving glimpse of her Dad's many messages on her answering machine. Those messages- they're not William Baldwin...but they're not fuckin' boring either, bubby.

Run out. Buy this book. Program your soul. Eternity is all about choices and will come down to picking one of two long bunny hop lines. One behind Sarah Palin and one behind Sarah Silverman. Don't get it wrong. show less

From my Cannonball Read 5 review ...

This is the second audiobook I’ve ‘read’ for the Cannonball Read. Sticking with my idea of listening to female comic memoirs read by the authors, I picked The Bedwetter. I chose it with a bit of trepidation, as while I’ve found myself laughing at some of Sarah Silverman’s work, I recalled that she’s said some things that left a bad taste in my mouth. In general I think people are pretty torn on Sarah Silverman. They either find her funny or show more find her annoying / inappropriate. After listening to this memoir I’m definitely more of a fan of her work.

The book has a very sincere tone to it without being annoying. She sounds like herself, but not like a character version of herself, if that makes sense. Whether it was an act or not, I imagined that this is what she’d sound like talking to her friends. She shares some stories that would clearly be mortifying for a child or teenager, making her quite relatable, and sheds some light onto both the world of making a sitcom-style show and working at Saturday Night Live as a writer.

I think my favorite parts were where she discussed jokes she’s told that were not well received. Probably the best-known instance of this was when she was on Conan O’Brien and made a joke that used a racial slur for Asian people. Many people I know would probably stop listening there, but I was in the middle of a run and so didn’t really have a choice. And by that point I’d also felt like I’d invested enough in the book to want to hear her discussion of it. You know what? It was a very interesting, well-thought out discussion. Yes, she is a comic who make jokes about poo, but she’s also a thoughtful person interested in social commentary.

The audio book is about six hours in length, so just long enough for me to listen to it over about a week’s worth of runs. I’m glad I purchased it instead of borrowing it from the library because it’s the kind of book I could see myself listening to again in the future. show less