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Sarah Silverman Jokes about Race
By
Jacob Dobkin
Published Oct 19, 2005
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
Jacob Dobkin
Published Oct 19, 2005
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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We finally had a chance to read this week's New Yorker profile of Sarah Silverman, and it was excellent. Lots of great Sarah Silverman facts-- for instance, she's lived in LA for about 10 years (that confused us, because her brand of black comedy seems so New York), and that she wet the bed well into high school (TMI?) The article really heats up towards the end, when it starts exploring her jokes about race and racism. In the interests of continuing our discussion about race here on Gothamist, check a few of them out:
I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors—expecting nothing, by the way—and they culled their money together, whatever they call it, and bought a stamp and sent me a postcard thanking me, and it said thank you and that they had enough sweaters for every single member of the village to get one and that they were delicious.
I was raped by a doctor... which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.
Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.
I got in trouble for saying the word “Chink” on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media. Right? What kind of a world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can’t say “Chink” on network television? It’s like the fifties. It’s scary... there are only two Asian people that I know that I have any problem with, at all. One is, uh, Guy Aoki. The other is my friend Steve, who actually went pee-pee in my Coke. He’s all, ‘Me Chinese, me play joke.’ Uh, if you have to explain it, Steve, it’s not funny.
Lots of people find these jokes pretty offensive, because they don't see a difference between a joke about racism and racism itself. Sarah's work seems pretty hilarious to us-- what do you think?
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Jacob Dobkin
Jake Dobkin co-founded Gothamist with Jen Chung. In 2019, Jake released Ask a Native New Yorker, a book based on his Gothamist advice column.
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