The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

by Sarah Silverman

  Some people react to buzz-words before listening to the context of those words. Isn't that ignorance?

  A storm has brewed in the wake of my appearance on The Conan O'Brien Show in which I used a derogatory slur for Chinese and other Asian people. You demanded an apology and received it from NBC, who also promised to edit my piece out of repeats of that show. I believe you have not served well the cause of rooting out racism.

  I am grateful to people, like yourself, who dedicate their selves to naming and making public the bigotry that they see. As a comedian, I use irony, often playing the role of ignoramus--like in the Conan piece in question--to turn the public eye toward the bigotry that goes unnoticed. The subtext is clearly in direct contrast to the text. It is ironic humor, and I see it as part of a larger effort-the same effort of which you are part.

  In this case, you reacted to a buzz-word without paying attention to its context.

  It is unfortunate, then, when the first reaction to an incident of suspected bigotry is to name an enemy and make demands. In this world-view, you have cast me as the bigot to your victim. I would have loved to talk to you about this face-to-face. I believe that real change happens when people put their energies together--not just from a series of issued statements. Sometimes awareness can even be raised by a comic's silly routine.

  You have garnered millions of dollars in free publicity with the exploitation of my joke. I would have preferred to talk seriously and honestly about how to address the real challenges to a good society. We obviously have different approaches to addressing racism. Certainly, that should not make us enemies.

  I apologize for the pain I've unintentionally caused you. Even if it was unintentional, even if it was the result of a misinterpretation.

  On an ongoing basis, I make it a practice to talk to people regarding the impact of my material and am grateful for your input.

  The Conan O'Brien show is great because they don't pull punches for any ethnic group. Speaking as a Jew (another group that is often an "easy target") I appreciate their willingness to make fun and illuminate what is buried yet very present in our social unconscious.

  Sincerely,

  Sarah Silverman

  * * *

  After doing the Conan show, I flew back to L.A. and met with my then-manager, Geoff Cheddy, a curly-haired Jew with a goofy smile. Geoff sat me down and started talking:

  "I pitched you for an all-comedian Fear Factor."

  "Are you fucking kidding me?? Do you know me at ALL?? In a million fucking years I wouldn't do--"

  "They don't want you."

  Suddenly, I wasn't feeling so cocky.

  "They don't want me on Fear Factor??"

  "They don't want you on NBC. At all."

  I was devastated. All of NBC?

  To be banished by an entire network is scary for a young comedian. It's not that I wanted, per se, to be cast on a show where you're forced to eat the maggot-filled rotting intestines of a dead yak, but when the people who cast the maggot-eating show don't want you, that's a whole new career low.

  Geoff went on to tell me that NBC had already released an apology for my behavior. As soon as Aoki complained, the network released this statement: "The joke was clearly inappropriate and the fact that it was not edited by our standards and practices department was a mistake. We have reviewed our procedures to ensure such an incident does not reoccur and we will edit the joke out of any future repeats."

  Wow. You can really tell that this message came straight from the network's heart, and it's not surprising. Of course mucky-mucks at NBC would be deeply dismayed and apologetic about my offensive joke and quick to apologize for it. After all, any network that shows people eating the maggot-filled rotting intestines of dead yaks--during primetime, no less--is a network devoted to the preservation of human dignity.

  Back at my apartment I picked up a message from one of the producers of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, inviting me to defend myself on the show; Guy Aoki would be on the panel. I accepted, having yet to learn that there is nothing more pointless, and nothing less funny, than defending your own material. My ignorance was about to end.

  * * *

  With No Awareness of the Irony, I Try to Redeem My Talk-Show Debacle by Appearing on a Talk Show

  * * *

  I arrived alone at Television City studios, but I had two comic friends on my guest list--Doug Benson and Brian Posehn. I was ushered past the greenroom where Guy Aoki was sitting. He had black pin-straight hair, cut in the exact bowl shape I had when I was five, and the same mustache I had till I was fifteen. (That's when I started bleaching it--the thinking being that if it's bright yellow, it's invisible.)

  The segment producer came into my dressing room to prepare me for the show. The typical format of Politically Incorrect involves discussion about topics in the news that day, ranging from politics to pop culture. But this show, I was told, would be almost entirely about us--Guy and me. My plan was to keep it light and jokey, but also sincere.

  The producer said Bill would ask me to repeat the joke in question.

  "No! Really? It will die like that! Can't you play the clip from Conan?"

  "No. We can't get the rights."

  NBC had vowed never to rebroadcast the joke in any form, including clips. The only topic of tonight's show was that joke, and there was no clip available. I would have to repeat the joke; it was the only way. Great.

  Before the producer left the room, she mentioned her annoyance over Guy Aoki's request for extra seats in the audience.

  "Really?" I asked. "How many people does he have out there?"

  "Sixty."

  "Sixteen??? He has sixteen people in the audience?? Are you fucking serious? I'm dead."

  She had to work up the gumption to tell me I had misheard her. Then she rallied:

  "Um, SixTEE."

  That motherfucker had sixty pissed-off people in the audience, and all I had were two professional stoner-comedians in the greenroom. I had one more question:

  "How many seats are there in the audience all together?"

  "One hundred and twenty-five."

  Kill me. Please. Please take my life.

  As it happened, there was no way to stop time, and before I knew it, this was happening:

  Bill Maher introduced Guy Aoki, me, David Spade, and an actress named Anne-Marie Johnson, most famous for being on the spin-off of What's Happening!! called What's Happening Now! Right off the bat, Bill asked me to repeat the joke. I did my best, but I was pretty mojo-less. The punch line was met with boos--sixty of them, as promised--which sent me spiraling downward and into a sinkhole of incoherence.

  Here's a partial transcript I found on Guy Aoki's Wikipedia page that pretty much says it all. (Feel free to wince at my enlistment of the word "dude.")

  MAHER: Wait a minute. So you're telling me--so you are telling me, sir, that there is some joke that could use the word "chink" done correctly, satirically, that would be okay.

  AOKI: I think it would definitely be okay.

  MAHER: Wait a second, that's what you said. You said, "It just wasn't done correctly." So what--give me an example--

  AOKI: No, I am just addressing one of the points she said, which was satire. I'm saying it wasn't good satire, anyway.

  SILVERMAN: That's objective, dude.

  MAHER: That's implying that some joke would be of such good satire that she could have said "chink."

  AOKI: What she could have said--what she could have said? She could have said, "I hate Chinese people. I love Chinese people." Would have gone, "Okay, funny joke, ha-ha." And that would have been over with.

  SILVERMAN: That's not the point of the joke. The joke is making fun--

  ANNE-MARIE JOHNSON: That's the question. Where is the joke?

  [Applause.]

  AOKI: The point is you used a slur that you thought you could get away with on national television.

  SILVERMAN: That's true. Racism is so--exists, you know, and it's not gonna go away.<
br />
  AOKI: It does?

  SILVERMAN: It's not gonna go away through censorship. Especially censorship with comics.

  AOKI: So we should just keep bad jokes and offend people over and over again.

  SILVERMAN: You're a douchebag, man.

  AOKI: [with mock surprise]: Oh oh! Oh oh!

  Bill was pretty spectacular in his defense of me and, more important, in defense of comedy, subjectivity, and free speech. Spade was hilarious as my no-help-whatsoever friend on the panel. He said practically nothing until the third or fourth segment, when he eked out something like "How come there aren't any white people parades?" Thanks, David. Anne-Marie was a typical C-list actress who was superpsyched to be on Politically Incorrect and show the world how smart she wasn't.

  Notes on a Politically Incorrect prep sheet, which they e-mail out to panelists the night before the show

  Notes on the reverse side of the Politically Incorrect prep sheet

  I think there is a need for cultural checks and balances, and I believe Guy Aoki has an important job. I just think he's shitty at it. His campaign against me mostly served to raise my profile as a comedian, and to make him look whiny, weak, and, worst of all, dense. I sympathize, because the job of fighting to change broad cultural attitudes is really hard, and I don't pretend to know how to go about it. What I might have suggested is that Guy seek a bigger and better target than me--a not-very-well-known comic who made a joke about racism on a late-night talk show, a joke that he misinterpreted. He might have found a meatier dish in, say, the show Chicago Hope. I'm not saying I had a problem with it personally, but that show did take place in a medical center based on Northwestern Memorial--a real Chicago hospital with a high percentage of Asian doctors, while the TV version featured exactly none (a fact I learned from Forrest G. Wood, a white man who wrote an article called "Hollywood and the Asian Exclusion"). Guy could have dined out on that for a year.

  * * *

  Guy Aoki: Heart in Right Place, Head Up Wrong Place

  * * *

  Guy would have really thrived in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. A man like him, with moderate intelligence, and maybe a good helping of courage and tenacity, could have made a name for himself by attacking the networks and studios who delivered Stepin Fetchit, Amos and Andy, and Al Jolson to American audiences. But in recent decades, an effective cultural crusader requires a more nuanced perception of irony and context.

  I grew up watching Archie Bunker, the ignorant racist character created by Norman Lear, who was, himself, famously devoted to advancing racial tolerance and progressive cultural values. Archie Bunker's racism was Lear's vessel for delivering comedy with a social message. Had Guy Aoki been operating in the '70s, he might have attacked Norman Lear as a racist. The bad news for guys like Aoki is that, not only are the progressive messages out there today more refined and sense-of-irony dependent, but racist messages are more oblique, too. Right-wing Americans who appear in mainstream media are not out there calling black people "niggers," or saying "The Klan has good ideas." Instead, they're questioning the legitimacy of Obama's presidency by accusing him of being born in Africa, or of being a Muslim. Or they're having "tea parties," and calling Obama a "communist" and a "Nazi." The entire Fox News Channel is a twenty-four-hour-a-day racism engine, but it's all coded, all implied. Lou Dobbs used to scream on CNN about "immigration," not "filthy Mexicans." I suspect the racist messages about Asians that permeate the media are even subtler, and therefore more difficult to combat.

  * * *

  Why It Is a Mistake to Deconstruct One's Self

  * * *

  As much as my dustup with Guy Aoki was about current cultural trends, it was, of course, also about me, and my choices as a comedian.

  In general, I never want to deconstruct what I do because I worry it can be identity crisis-y. There is this thing in physics called the observer effect, which basically says that you can never purely observe anything because the presence of the observer changes the thing. That's my fear about deconstructing comedy. Say someone says to you, "I love how when you smile you do that thing with your lip." And you think, What thing with my lip?? And for the rest of your fucking life you are too self-conscious to really truly organically smile. It's been tainted. Becoming too self-aware, too cognizant of your own process.

  A brief digression: A lot of comics think the real threat of mental blockage lies in becoming happy. They fear that happiness or even just dealing with their shit might make them not funny anymore. To me, that's a bunch of romanticized bullshit. I don't know. I guess if you write your best stuff when you're miserable, maybe, but I don't. I'm paralyzed when I'm miserable. I sleep. A lot. I will always try to be happy. I don't think people really understand the value of happiness until they know what it's like to be in that very, very dark place. It's not romantic. Not even a little.

  * * *

  I Will Now Deconstruct Myself

  * * *

  When I was nineteen my stand-up was about the newest and most important things in my life: sex and drugs. My roommates and I had painted our apartment the exact shade of purple to match our twelve-dollar bong.

  I was earnest and sensitive and, believe it or not, politically correct to the max. Example: My friend Mark Cohen--every comic's favorite comic and the quickest mind anyone knew--grabbed a nickel from our table at the Washington Square Diner, stuck it on his forehead, and yelped, "Jewish Ash Wednesday!"

  Everyone laughed but me. I was upset. Cohen (Coco) rolled his eyes at me for ruining his fun, but I couldn't help it. I was hurt that he would perpetuate a stereotype like that.

  I know.

  Index card for my first joke after Jimmy Kimmel introduced me at the Hugh Hefner roast. It was the first time I remember meeting Jimmy (though he says we met once before).

  The truth is, from that time up to now, inside, I haven't changed. My outer shell may mutate, I may come to embrace the things that scare and upset me, but it all comes from the same place. At some point, I figured that it would be more effective and far funnier to embrace the ugliest, most terrifying things in the world--the Holocaust, racism, rape, et cetera. But for the sake of comedy, and the comedian's personal sanity, this requires a certain emotional distance. It's akin to being a shrink or a social worker. You might think that the most sensitive, empathetic person would make the best social worker, but that person would end up being soup on the floor. It really takes someone strong--someone, dare I say, with a big fat wall up--to work in a pool of heartbreak all day and not want to fucking kill yourself. But adopting a persona at once ignorant and arrogant allowed me to say what I didn't mean, even preach the opposite of what I believed. For me, it was a funny way to be sincere. And like the jokes in a roast, the hope is that the genuine sentiment--maybe even a goodness underneath the joke (however brutal) transcends. The problem with this formula is that once the irony becomes the audience's expectation, the surprise is gone.

  * * *

  I Get Tricked into Being a Dick

  * * *

  With all the religious and racial material I've done, the bulk of complaints and outcry have come from the advocates of what must be the hardest suffering of all minorities: uber-rich, thin, young blondes.

  In June of 2007, I was hired to host the MTV Movie Awards. As part of my standard hosting duties, I went onstage at the top of the show and told jokes about celebrities and current events in pop culture. In general, I don't do those kinds of jokes in my regular stand-up. The only time I really do that is when it's required, like at a roast (and that is done with love), or at events like the Movie Awards.

  One of the biggest events in pop culture at that time was the impending lockup of Paris Hilton. To refresh your memory, Paris was sentenced to a brief stay at the L.A. county jail for drunk driving, then violating her parole and driving drunk again. Here's what I said onstage about her (a great joke written by Jonathan Kimmel, with a tagline by me):

  In a couple of days, Paris Hilton is going to jail. The judge say
s that it's gonna be a no-frills thing, and that is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, I hear that in order to make her feel more comfortable in prison, the guards are gonna paint the bars to look like penises. I just worry that she's gonna break her teeth on those things.

  What can't be conveyed in the above quote is the audience's reaction. When I said, "Paris Hilton is going to jail," the crowd erupted into a sustained, almost primal frenzy of cheers and applause. Not even the announcement of free universal health care could have incited such passion. The camera trained on her coupled with the eruption of cheers at her impending imprisonment made my heart sink. This was not a jibe at the roast of an old salt. She was a Christian thrown to the lions in an arena of Romans cheering her imminent demise.

  I had no moral qualms, in theory, with joking about Paris's incarceration--it's what late-night talk-show hosts had been doing for weeks. But to set her up to be jeered to her face by thousands on live television during the most vulnerable, frightening moment of her life--needless to say, that took the fun out of the "all in good fun" essence I intended. Whether it was an innocent oversight, or a very calculating one, no one producing the show informed me until minutes before I went onstage that Paris would be in the audience. With that very late piece of information, I didn't stop to concentrate, to seriously imagine how that whole moment might come together.