Up Close and Personal With Sarah Silverman
Comedian Silverman talks teen depression and her brother's accidental death.
April 16, 2010— -- At some point, most "edgy" comedians deliberately choose to make a living with a potty mouth. For Sarah Silverman, that decision came right around potty training.
"I was three and my dad hilariously taught me how to swear," Silverman, 39, said. "I yelled out, 'Bitch, bastard, damn, s**t.'"
Her toddler shock humor brought peals of laughter. Silverman said the approval made her "dance uncontrollably like Snoopy. The feeling of pride made my arms itch."
To this day "that arms itch thing is like when I get a really big laugh," she said, "It's a joyful experience."
Silverman is a unique presence in Hollywood: an adorable-tomboy-next-door with a heart of gold and tongue of acid. The combination makes a lot more sense in the light of her new memoir, "The Bedwetter: Tales of Courage, Redemption and Pee," which hits bookstores April 20.
In a series of witty and candid essays, Silverman reveals, among other things, that she wet her bed into her mid-teens.
"The constant humiliation made bombing on stage or the prospect of it like uh, yeah, no problem. It's no problem," she said.
An uncontrollable bladder was just one burden for Silverman, who reveals she was once a clinically-depressed child of divorce. In her teens, she was medicated with 16 Xanax a day.
"I was taking four Xanax, four times a day and I was 14. I saved all the bottles in a shoebox because I remember thinking this can't be right and I want evidence," she said. "But this doctor saved me and took me off of it a half a pill less a week and I took my last half a Xanax when I was 16. Then I was myself again. I was like happy-go-lucky me again."
These days, work is her natural antidepressant. Silverman has hosted a self-titled sitcom on Comedy Central since 2007. The third season is wrapped and the program probably won't return for a fourth.
What kind of work comes next for Silverman is anyone's guess; there's always stand-up, where she got her start.
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