Biography

Sarah Silverman is a comedian and actress known for her style, which combines pointed satire with a cheerful willingness to outrage with her purposefully over the top commentary on race, gender, and politics. First rising to fame as an actress on television and in movies, Silverman would later find an audience for her bold, conceptual style of stand-up comedy through the performance film Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic and the HBO special We Are Miracles. Sarah Silverman was born on December 1, 1970 in Bedford, New Hampshire. The youngest of five siblings, she became interested in comedy as a teenager, and performed her first public standup set when she was 17 (a performance she's described as "awful"). Silverman dropped out of New York University to begin pursuing a comedy career full-time, and in 1993, she landed a prize gig as a writer and featured player on Saturday Night Live. Her run on SNL was short, lasting just 18 weeks, with Silverman later saying she was too young at the time and a poor fit for the show. She fared better as a featured performer on the groundbreaking HBO series Mr. Show with Bob and David, and later made guest appearances on Star Trek: Voyager, Seinfeld, Frasier, Greg the Bunny, Monk, and many others. Silverman also broke into movies, making her big-screen debut in the independent comedy Who's the Caboose, and playing supporting characters in Bulworth, There's Something About Mary, Heartbreakers, and School of Rock. Silverman continued working as a standup comic, and in 2005, she released a concert film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, which combined her standup routine with musical interludes and comedy sketches; the film's soundtrack, released by Interscope, became her first comedy album. In 2007, Comedy Central debuted The Sarah Silverman Program, in which Silverman played a fictionalized version of herself; the show ran two seasons on Comedy Central while the cable outlet Logo aired the third and final season; an album of music and dialogue from the show, Songs of the Sarah Silverman Program: From Our Rears to Your Ears, was released by Comedy Central Records in 2010. In 2011, Silverman played a major supporting role in the acclaimed independent film Take This Waltz, and a year later, she earned enthusiastic reviews for an uncharacteristic voice performance as an overly cute video game character in the family-friendly animated comedy Wreck-It Ralph. In 2013, she returned to a less-wholesome form as she taped a comedy special for HBO, We Are Miracles; in 2014, Sub Pop Records issued a soundtrack album of the performance. Silverman's career stayed in high gear as she starred in the well-reviewed independent comedy-drama I Smile Back in 2015 (her performance earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination), launched a politically oriented talk show for Hulu, I Love You, America, with Sarah Silverman, and reprised her voice role in Wreck-It Ralph for the Oscar-nominated sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet. In 2017, Silverman wrote and performed a new comedy special for Netflix, A Speck of Dust, and an audio version of the performance was released on LP by Netflix and Comedy Dynamics. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi