Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust

Sarah Silverman delivers a compelling, funny routine which closes with her personal medical emergency. First, she starts off the show with metal detectors and death threat. While the audience laughed heartily, I felt a little discombobulated. It's the times we live in and that particular issue is hard to laugh at. Although if I was in the audience, the laughing could be quite cathartic. Anyways, she quickly moves on. With complaining Jew and laser hair removal, the routine builds up well. There is good flow and consistent laughs. Of course, there is plenty of abortion jokes amid the present political climate. At one point, she asks for any religious audience members and only one Lutheran volunteered. The medical emergency is quite funny and there is a fun video proof of its reality to close out the special. In the end, this is standard Silverman comedy with her deadpan delivery and outrageous material. It is a solid one hour show.

This isn't a review, just a comment on Silverman preparing a joke by mentioning the landing on Mars in 2012. Someone laughs in the audience and she makes a little remark on that. My nerdy theory: the guy who laughed at the wrong moment knew that we landed on Mars back in 1976, but Silverman made it sound like 2012 was the first time.

No, I'm sorry, I have to disagree with the rave reviews. I'm a Sarah fan. She's one of the smartest and funniest out there. But this is the wrong direction. There's a lot to enjoy here. Not the belly laugh kind. The kind of thing she excels at, discussing things that actually sound real in her life and posing them in a funny and revelatory way, pointing out the boundaries of our artificially constricted moralities. Fine. I'm up with that. What is different here is her self consciousness. She's a woman who has a great range of facial expressions and usually can't talk without her arms and hands being part of the conversation. Did someone tell her that's not cool? Her style is more mannered in this one, her pauses more mechanical, her facial tics more like an actor's. She was great the way she was. She doesn't need to be slicker. I liked it that sometimes she would be doing a bit and the audience wouldn't seem to be getting it and she'd be so surprised at their dumbness she'd back track to try and get them to see what was funny. Yeah, maybe a bad idea in personal terms. Not slick but human. It was 'the new' cool. Showed how sparky she was and how vulnerable at the same time, that she wanted to be telling you something. Maybe this was a performance on a night she wasn't in her best place. The real Sarah Silverman is better than this.

Although very popular, Silverman is an acquired taste in terms of her style, her comedy, and her politics. I think too often she relies on the shock factor juxtaposed with her fresh-faced attractive appearance, but mostly she has a fine wit behind so much of what she does. With this show there was a decent mix of personal reflection combined with that same shock factor material. Although she has some digs at Trump, the show wisely stays away from political humor but mostly takes from her personal situation and memories of her family. In this way the show is quite interesting, although it perhaps reduces laughs at times.

Silverman seems a little different than I've seen her before. She felt very static and limited in her movements while on stage. In terms of her interaction with the audience, these also felt a little unnatural, and I wasn't always sure that it worked when she stopped her own show to look back at a line etc. In this way it was not a wholly successful show, and although I enjoyed it, I concede it was not as funny as I hoped, nor was Silverman as engaging.

I have loved much of Sarah's work in the past, but her newest special disappointed me. It deserves a 5 out of 10 because it was funny and witty about 50% of the time. The other 50% was a mixture of political talking points and misinformed scientific facts. I did laugh out loud a few times but the majority of jokes were poorly written, especially by her standards. I think I counted around 5 complex joke premises, all of which were very well executed, but the rest fell flat.