One Night Stand-up

Sarah Silverman chooses strong comedy over political attack on Perry's perceivedracism

Foul mouthed comedienne Sarah Silverman made a big statement to get the media’s attention, but ultimately, her comedy protest against Rick Perry turned out to be just a well-hyped comedy show.

With only a few well-placed references to Perry, Stripping the Paint Off of Good ol’ Fashioned Racism meandered playfully around the topic, only touching on race as often as would normally happen in a six-person comedy show.

Because of the title and impetus for the show, perhaps I was primed for Silverman's brand of ironic racist commentary and smart race humor. Instead, my primed and hyper-aware senses picked up on all the misogynistic and homophobic jokes that no one thought to edit out of the show.

I know, I know, it's comedy. You're going to have that... But at a show with a purpose like this one, should you?

The nearly full house of like-minded liberals at the Paramount flipped out for the outspoken Silverman, who served as the ideal opening and closing act as well as the host for the evening.

The format smoothly volleyed the attention from one comedian to the next, and Silverman showed her comfortable confidence throughout, even bringing her notes onstage and pitching her newest jokes with pre-emptive apologies. That casual approach showed her honest sincerity toward the evening and its goals. (All of the proceeds went to the NAACP.)

I was wondering how many times throughout the evening Silverman might drop the N-word, but it only took one reference to the famous emblazoned rock outside Perry’s family’s camp to remind us all why we were in attendance.

The rest of Silverman’s set involved her typical unexpected string of hilarious offenses to Jews, children and animals. It’s old hat that she’s going to offend us, so hearing her new she-went-there’s are what make the material continue feeling fresh.

Thankfully, Silverman never turned the evening into a political rant meant to whoop the gathered masses into a bipartisan frenzy. When the show was first announced, I was nervous she might use this opportunity to deliver a long political message with light laughter a la Margaret Cho in her last few stand-up specials. Thankfully, she kept the tone light and the focus on the edgy comedy.

Fellow (comedy) household name, Tig Notaro, brought maybe the biggest genuine laughs of the evening with her non-sequiturs and increasingly more famous comedy meta-humor. Ironically, Notaro was also the only performer of the night who avoided any political commentary whatsoever.

It would have seemed out of place for Notaro to inject a political message in her routine—she’s more abstract and Seinfeldian than that. However, while appearing in this show and avoiding all the other nasty-isms of her fellow comedians, she ended up making a stronger statement about comedy in general. Notaro shows how comedians can be hysterical without inflicting verbal violence on women and gay people.

It’s nothing new to anyone that stand-up comedy has been slow to catch up to the standards of political correctness at which the rest of the world operates. In fact, political correctness is an easy target for comedians because of the hypocrisy and extremes that critics employ. Most comics would argue, and I completely agree, that we have to be willing to laugh at and expose our hidden phobias and attitudes to finally exorcize them.

Normally, when I go to see stand-up comedy in town, I can turn off that “grad school” part of my brain that identifies the mechanization of oppression at work in our everyday lives. But when I’m attending an evening of comedy where I’m told we’re going to collectively avoid racism, I naively assume we might also include other minority groups as well.

Of course, there are ways to offer searing commentary through clever, creative comedy. Silverman herself is the perfect practitioner of this. Wanda Sykes and Dave Chappelle and Patton Oswalt and even early Margaret Cho are other examples. There’s an element of sharp critique in all of their work that transcends the obvious stereotypes that we’ve absorbed for centuries.

Knowing this possibility exists, it was an unfortunate missed opportunity for Silverman to show that she could assemble a crew of comedians who could cleverly and succinctly comment upon the political issue she proposed (Perry’s unacceptable racism) without including jokes that put down other groups.

It wouldn’t be fair to call out the other comedians in last night’s show by their individual jokes, because, taken out of context, all edgy humor looks like a horrible list of prosecutable offenses. But to me, it was a big disappointment that a couple of the comedians included jokes at the expense of women and gay people that seemed in bad taste given the theme of evening.

Last minute addition to the lineup, comedian Jamie Kilstein, came the closest to using his set as a platform for political dialogue, albeit about homophobia and gay marriage. His slam poetry-esque style and current event focus was a refreshing reprieve, but it seemed out of place in an evening primarily intended to address racism.

Kilstein’s set intelligently hinted at the interconnectedness of oppression in minority issues, but it lost its impact when the next comedian followed him up with some blatantly homophobic jokes. It was a little too much for my exhausted brain to process.

In the end, Silverman played the audience out with a hysterically sincere song about another offensive word for women’s genitalia. Never once did she stop to address the topic of the evening or the show’s title. So it’s unclear whether her original goal of raising awareness about Perry’s racism was met.

Overall, it was a fun and challenging night and a special occasion for everyone in attendance. I’m so pleased I got to see Silverman and Notaro in practice, and I’m glad it was comprehensively a night of predominately sharp stand-up comedy. I was literally crying from laughing so hard at several points in the evening.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the two white women walking around in blackface. Do with that as you will. I, for one, was not ready to handle it, even ironically.

As mentioned before, comedy has the power to transform us by calling out those parts of us we don’t like to admit exist. Recognizing the interconnectedness of those parts is the next step.

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Theatrical History

New play weaves stories of real Austin women together from 1950s on

Photo courtesy of

A photo from the She Was Here dress rehearsal ahead of its world premier.

On January 17, She Was Here, a play about real Latina women in Austin, premieres at Austin Playhouse's new interim theatre space off of West 22nd Street. Although the story is fictional, it was compiled through interviews, making it a truthful rendition of Austin across 70 years.

Written by Austin's renowned Raul Garza and directed by Jerry Ruiz, this poignant but lighthearted play is about how Austin, and culture more generally, have changed over the decades. It's about how women's roles are shifting—moving forward, and sometimes backward; it's about mothers and daughters, and it's about the relationship between people and the space around them.

As Garza puts it, "What imprints do places leave on our soul, and what imprints does our soul leave on [a] place?"

The play was originally written and developed during the pandemic. Garza had received a grant from the city during a time when theatre could be written, but not attended.

"It was a time when there was nothing going on," says Garza, "so we just kind of got reacquainted with what was around us."

For this play's devising team, which included Garza, director Jerry Ruiz, Katie Bender, and mother and daughter Giselle de la Rosa and Chamila Muñoz, what was around them was Austin.

"I wondered what it would be like to wake up 50 years in the past, 60 years in the past, and revisit the exact same physical space but with a new sensibility," says Garza.

Ester A photo of Ester, one of the women whose stories inspired the play. Photo courtesy of Raul Garza

With this idea, Garza and the team began talking to multiple generations of Latina women from Austin, starting with Garza's own mother who went to UT. From there, they expanded their conversations to include multiple groups and multiple family members—activists, mothers, daughters—all via Zoom or the phone. They asked them, How did you get here? What hardships did you encounter? What was it like for you then?

The story that began weaving itself together showed that despite changing times and a changing place, the little things in life always remained the same.

The play, starring Tonie Knight, Alyssa Hurtado, Vivian Noble, and Yesenia García Herrington, is inspired by these stories; but it doesn't focus on any one of them autobiographically. Instead, it follows the lives of two imagined families in one imagined house over the span of decades.

"We see this one consistent place, a physical house, that we imagined was somewhere in the Rainey Street neighborhood," says Garza. "And we see what happens to the lives of the people who inhabit that space, from the 50s through 2020. So it's like you're a fly on the wall, if you could be a fly on the wall in your grandmother's house. The setting is definitely a character."

Joann and her family Joann, pictured here with her family, was one of the women interviewed for this play.Photo courtesy of Raul Garza

At first, this might sound like a play about how things are getting better over time, but of course, it's not that simple. Austin is being developed, and depending on who you ask, we're better or worse off than we were a few decades ago. The same goes for women's rights; it certainly hasn't been a linear progression.

"In the wake of our latest election, it really made us stop and think," Garza says. "Wow, they're talking about the ERA March in 1975; we're talking about the ERA March in 2025. What is going on here?!"

Though the play covers some important and at times heavy topics, Garza says it's also a lot of fun; he hopes the audience comes away with a new appreciation for Austin, for those around them, and for the stories we all hold.

She Was Here is showing at Austin Playhouse Theatre at 405 West 22nd Street, from January 17 though February 9. Tickets range between $24 and $38 and can be purchased online.

theater plays women history