Sarah Silverman shows how do to compassion

January 7, 2018 • 1:30 pm

CBC Radio has a lovely article about one of my favorite people, Sarah Silverman. Yes, her comedy may sometimes be hard to take, but I love her nonetheless. Even more now, as the CBC’s piece shows how she dealt with a troll in an exchange that began as follows:

It turns out the guy was peeved because he was friendless and on prescription meds and smoked weed for the pain of slipped discs that he couldn’t afford to get treated. Sarah did a call-out and got a response (I’m omitting some of the tweets here; so go see them on the CBC page):

It even sounds as if she was willing to foot some of the cost, but it wasn’t necessary:

Sarah’s lately been calling for us to understand those we oppose, and here she goes the extra mile for someone who called her a “cunt”. Now that is a decent human being!

 

h/t: Barry

27 thoughts on “Sarah Silverman shows how do to compassion”

  3. ‘Cunt’ didn’t become a term of abuse until the late 19th century, though it has always denoted the same thing since at least the late Middle Ages. (There is a notorious pun on the word in “Hamlet” and it is plentiful in English lit before the 17th century.)

    Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues” has one section on women reclaiming the word, a show I am sure Sarah Silverman is familiar with.

    However, she was willing in an amusing way to use the word pejoratively herself in this clip which I post here.

    https://youtu.be/eALkqAWJmDw

    2. Since the middle ages indeed. Just Google
      “GropeCunt Lane” and you’ll see that it was a
      common street name for the red light district in some medieval English cities.

      1. Ever since Steven Pinker did a lecture on swearing that included “kiss the cunt of a cow”, a friend and I have been trying to bring it back into the vernacular. No luck so far.

      2. In the town of Shrewsbury GB ,there is a narrow passage way called Grope lane .
        I in my innocence thought it refers to how narrow it is ,You can not lie head to toes across it .

    3. And she sings it so sweetly, too.

      I love Sarah Silverman 🙂

      cr

      P.S. Saw ‘Vagina Monologues’ in Auckland years ago. Was good. At one point the performers encouraged the audience to join in the ‘C’ song, which had just one word of lyrics, to the tune of ‘Frere Jacques’. One couple near us walked out at that point, I still wonder exactly what they had expected the play to be about.

        1. Well, one didn’t *have* to sing the dreaded word. One could just stay mute. (My built-in inhibitions were such that I just mumbled ‘cunty cunty….’ It’s curious, I would have thought I had no inhibitions about that word, particularly since many others were singing it, but habit is very strong)

          cr

    4. I have a gay male friend who says he absolutely hates that word. I’m not sure that he is unbiased about the matter.

      Some years ago I worked at a restaurant. A female patron transmitted the following limerick to me, which I absorbed into my memory upon the first hearing: (Forgive my censorship; it’s the latent Calvinist Protestant Puritan in me.)

      “There once was a queen of Bulgaria,
      Whose c – – – over time had got hairier,
      Till a prince from Peru
      Who had come down for a screw,
      Had to hunt for her c – – – with a terrier.”

      1. What is it about the limerick format that seems to facilitate – nay, encourage – ribald verses?

        cr

  9. I am a fan of Sarah Silverman. Great comedian and person. Her latest show on Netflix was very funny.

  13. Wasn’t it our Sarah who said, when they call you a cunt they’re saying you’re deep and warm?

  14. I also read recently a headline of a mosque paying the fine of someone accused of defacing it.

    I also read of the story of an Inuk who had a few items of food he had put away for “a rainy day” (as we’d say) taken without his permission. He berated (contrary to tradition) the thief and then gave him the food anyway. He figured (as he explained to his daughter who recounts the story) that the thief was either so desperate to violate the communal food (any time it would have been used it would have been shared anyway) and hence deserved it anyway or would be horribly shamed by this act of forgiveness that he’d never do it again.

  15. That story made my day. It humbles me to think that with all my (supposed) Christian upbringing (atheist now, not that it matters), I haven’t thought for a long time about the biblical injunction to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you..” I keep wondering how people can relate to one another in today’s divisive political climate, then I read a story like Sarah’s, and remember that love is the universal language. Good on ya, Sarah Silverman! 🙂

    I’ve always loved this poem:

    “He drew a circle that shut me out-
    Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout.
    But love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle and took him In !”

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