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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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by mike bolles
Thursday, 10:30 p.m.
Comedy Central
Who can get away with crashing into a children’s playground drunk on cough syrup, starting a fund-raiser by falsely claiming to have AIDS, and making fun of a homeless guy’s mother’s queefing problem on national TV? Only the adorable comedian Sarah Silverman, star of The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central.
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The slender, cute-as-a-button Silverman shines in her first feature television show, which is a mixture of sketch, musical, and outright outlandish comedy. Sarah stars as herself, along with Brian and Steve (her unassumingly gay neighbors) and her real-life sister, Laura, who also plays her sister in the program. Laura is a nurse who meets Jay, the police officer that books Sarah after finding her parked in the sand pit of a playground, when she shows up at the police station to take care of her sister’s little DUI problem. The two quickly fall in love, which provokes a jealous Sarah to make it her mission to do everything in her power to break them up. This usually involves embarrassing or upstaging Jay every chance she gets.
When Jay announces he is receiving an award for his time spent reading to blind children, Sarah decides to one-up him by telling Laura, Brian, and Steve of her plans to take in a homeless man she knew from high school (this is the guy whose mother, a cafeteria lady at their high school, had the problem with uncontrollable queefing). In another example of Sarah’s efforts to shove Jay out of the picture, while planning Jay’s birthday party, Sarah walks in and tells the group that she has AIDS. The only thing is, she doesn’t even know for a fact that she has it. However, she is convinced because of how badly the Q&A session went with the nurse at her free HIV test. In fact, at one point the nurse asks her, “Are you trying to get AIDS?” Caught in the middle of all this is Laura, who is torn between the sister she unconditionally supports (both emotionally and financially) and her new love, Jay, who grows increasingly more aggravated with every stunt Sarah decides to pull.
As for Brian and Steve, they both seem pretty much indifferent to the drama surrounding the unorthodox love triangle that is Sarah, Laura, and Jay. They create their own hysterical moments as a bickering couple. When I say that these two are unassumingly gay, I mean they are exactly the opposite of what the average American visualizes gay men to look and act like. Both Brian and Steve are hairy, overweight hippie-types who act completely masculine. This makes their fighting scenes that much more hilarious. Their first argument stems from Brian’s statement that he is not gay and, instead, is bisexual. Steve, angered by the claim, then challenges him to “name three parts of a woman’s vagina.” Later in the same episode, Steve walks in on Brian masturbating to a lingerie catalogue. The only catch is that Brian has stapled pictures of Steve’s face onto the bodies of the models, making it semi-forgivable.
If you’re not quite sure what to think of all this, don’t worry. It all makes sense in Sarah’s weird, imaginative world. Or should I say Sarah’s weird, perverted, sick, deranged, imaginative world? Any way you look at it, The Sarah Silverman Program is easily one of the funniest TV shows to hit the airwaves in some time. This show never for a minute stops to consider how politically incorrect its topics are, which is a breath mint in the tooth-decayed mouth of a comedy television landscape more worried about offending the viewer than doing what it’s supposed to do, which is make us laugh. Although sometimes lacking in maturity, The Sarah Silverman Program is never short on the stuff that counts: laugh-out-loud humor.
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