Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles (2013) Reviews

• It's Definitely Our Sarah

  jegd-847-6314072013-11-29

  I had the misfortune of watching Sarah's HBO Special 'We Are Miracles' with a religious conservative. Someone that completely understands the material but yells, "That Bitch" when the rape jokes come. On the plus side Sarah was able to breach the stone heart of that Jesus lover and get her to laugh with me. Amazing how that happens. Sarah is a great comedian. Definitely my favorite comedian, but I found that she was telling previous jokes I'd already heard on talk shows or read from her Twitter profile ... And as well from older pieces of her memoir 'The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee'. Yes, the show was funny overall ... don't get me wrong, but I'm not one to spare the feelings of anybody - even if I do love the smell of their poo. A special on HBO should have been built on all new material and I felt cheated of that. Maybe in the same way I feel cheated after watching every Kathy Griffin show on Bravo. When someone keeps talking about the same things over & over again. It loses my attention, because it's stale & predictable. I demand more of Sarah, because she genuinely enjoys making us laugh. Much more than she desires to fill every seat in a theater. There was also the problem of watching Bill Cosby on Comedy Central first. I found Sarah following an act that had set the tone for me. Cosby isn't trying to be "edgy" "controversial" or whatever terminology comedians use today ... Bill was just trying to make me laugh ... and he's a pro at that. He engages the audience and can just talk to his fans completely unrehearsed. I find Sarah does very little of that (unless a heckler attacks her) she pretty much ignores her audience and sticks to the routine. That's one step away from reading your jokes off of cards to me. During a LIVE I'd go stupid if she acknowledged me during a LIVE performance. There at The Largo she had an audience of maybe 40 people she just talked at. I see so many people begging for just the smallest nugget from her that they "heckle" just to get that attention. I guess my final word here would be that Sarah continues to play to the same selection of fans and give people what they expect from her. It's going to hurt her in the end and I don't want that to happen to our Sarah.

• A 1 of a Kind Comedian

  A_Different_Drummer2015-03-02

  The challenge with this kind of review is whether to review the comic or to review the material or just throw in the towel and do both. A one of a kind comic. So real it hurts. The first thing you notice is that she is a natural beauty, even when she is not trying. This somewhat distracts from the material, but she knows, and she works it. So it is part of the act. The next thing you notice is that her material so deep, so experimental, so I-don't-care-if-u-laugh that you are compelled to listen that much more carefully, to try to capture the experience not just the joke. Like most comics operating in the rarefied air she prefers, she could do easier (and funnier) material, but she would probably sooner have a root canal. Or whatever the "painful female equivalent" of a root canal is. A few years back, a brave film-maker did a documentary on the one "forbidden" joke that comics only ever told to each other, but never to the public. Not kidding. A real joke involving a lot of ad-libbing which every comic had a variation of, but the public had never heard of. The film-maker then went to a dozen or so top comics and had them do their version of the joke on camera. Some of the best comics in the world participated. But Silverman was generally considered to have been the funniest in the film, not merely because she told the joke but because she managed to do a segue where the joke (supposedly) triggered a suppressed memory. "My agent raped me," she said deadpan to the camera, halfway through the joke. "I just remembered that my agent raped me." Now, that does not SOUND funny but, in context, it was drop dead funny. And so it is with this special. If you get into the context and pay attention more to the artist than the material (which is not always the way comedy works) it is quite a treat. Carlin was like that at the end of his life. He could do "funny" but did not want to. He had things he wanted to say and if you paid for a concert, you were ^%^**^ well going to hear them. Same here.

• HK Auteur Review - Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles

  hkauteur2013-12-20

  Sarah Silverman is a comedian that's always been around, but an artist I never directly got into by chance. I watched a few episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program, which was too obscure for my taste. But I always enjoyed her cameo in Judd Apatow's Funny People, Louie and thought she gave an effective supporting performance in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz. I enjoyed clips of her standup online, but have not seen her perform a complete comedy hour till now. The decision to shoot the special at the Largo Comedy Club in front of 39 people is a great one. Silverman never looks far off into the distance or above to a balcony booth. There's no big giant TV screen of her in the background for the cheap seats. The intimacy of the Largo lends itself for Silverman's raunchy off-the-wall random tangent comedy, giving her much more freedom to roam from topic to topic without transitions. "I don't need segue ways." Silverman quips, "The brain doesn't work that way." Some of the joke highlights were a childhood story of how her older sister used to scare her, sin atonement in Christianity and a bit about the Make A Wish foundation. It's nice how much politically incorrect jokes she gets away with, showing an affable innocent girly persona can really go a long way to make hard topics durable. The whole experience is more akin to a live show, as Silverman is able to milk laughs from silences and even counter critique audience reactions when they aren't up to par. It's always awkward when comedians do audience interaction in big theater shows and this completely fixes that. The reactions from the 39 people create a more potent, immersive connection to Silverman's perspective. And making 39 people laugh, after all, is much harder than making 200 people laugh.

• Hilarious

  thogstacker2013-11-24

  I didn't discover Silverman until her Comedy Central show and then, of course, realized she'd been around for a while. I'll say upfront I'm a fan so when I saw this was coming out I was really looking forward to it. Well, I loved it. Silverman's insightful, crude, awkwardly shocking, highly structured approach to comedy always gives me a bucket of LOLs. Like Louis CK she approaches some subjects with the intent to disturb. 911, rape jokes, gang bangs, etc. are not meant to make you go "it's funny because it's true!" Rather they're kind of ushering a meta level where the spin is "It's funny because it's AWWWWKward." Anyway, her choice to film in a small venue adds an intimacy and texture that makes the special stand out from most other HBO specials and if you like funny, insightful comics, Tivo it.

• It's not what you think it is

  s_iliya_p2018-11-25

  I gave it 5 stars, because I think the director did a good job, and technically speaking that deserves a good score. I gave it just 5 stars, because Sarah Silverman's comedy is not for everyone, I didn't even smile throughout the show, most of the jokes are redundant, very easy to figure out. She talks too slowly and that just kills it for me. She does use profanity in language, which I assume is a very different form of it considering the works of George Carlin and Louis C.K. I just think it's not for everyone.