Satch Point #1 (first of a series)

Is anybody sick of Sarah Silverman yet? You know, the hot, young comedian that Rolling Stone called the "Funniest Woman in America" on their most recent cover. The fairly attractive woman who has been glowingly profiled by Entertainment Weekly, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and Slate.com. The one who makes jokes about rape, the Holocaust, and slavery, and has this movie "Jesus Is Magic" coming out. Familiar yet?

Boy, is she getting on my goddam nerves. First of all, because she is everywhere and I am at my saturation point with her (hence the title). Now, I realize that every movie needs to generate a certain amount of publicity, and we are in fairly arid times, movie-wise, right now (Chicken Little, number one movie for two weeks!). However, the gush that this woman is generating is ridiculous. For most media outlets, the thinking goes like this: Sarah Silverman's publicist, and another dozen or so mags, websites, and papers say that she is hot and hip, so if I feature her, my mag/website/paper must be hot and hip, too. How this adequately explains the THREE features that Slate.com devoted to Silverman on Monday, the 14th (movie review, slavish Q&A, and a remarkably asinine piece justifying her racial jokes), well, I can't say.

You see, the elephant in the room where Sarah Silverman is concerned, and the topic that writers are breaking their rhetorical backs justifying, is the tenor of Silverman's racial humor, which seems, in my opinion, to attain new levels of crassness. A random sampling of her jokes goes, as follows (I'll say I'm paraphrasing, but most of these have been repeated so many times, it's like I know them by heart):

"I got a summons for jury duty, but I didn't want to serve. So a friend told me to write something really offensive on the questionaire, like "I hate chinks." But I thought it would be wrong to do that. So instead I wrote, "I love chinks."

"Guess what, Martin Luther King? I had a dream, too. I had a dream that I was in my living room. It wasn't my living room, but it was my living room. I went to the backyard, where there was a pool. And before I got into it, a shark came out. And he had braces. So maybe you're not so fucking special."

"I don't care if you think I'm a racist, I just want you think I'm thin."

And there's that new one I heard about how she tells a handsome Black suitor something along the lines of, "you'd sell for a lot of money as a slave."

Silverman, a supposed product of a liberal upbringing, "gets away" with these jokes, according to her Greek chorus of press, because she's unthreateningly pretty and perky. Like that niece that you wouldn't spank for breaking your favorite lamp. How could you hurt someone so ittle-wittle cute?

Sure, she's commenting on the mindset that allows this hypocrisy, but she's feeding on it just as much. Profile writers strain their thesauruses looking for ways to describe Silverman's looks. Are other female comics that ugly? And are, say, Wanda Sykes' observations not as valuable because she doesn't look like Beyonce?

Oh, and edginess. Is anyone tired of edginess yet? Edginess plays every night at 10 on Comedy Central. Carlos Mencia is edgy. Funny, no, but real edgy. Colin Quinn's Comedy Central show trafficked in the same racial humor as Silverman without getting anywhere near the same attention. Is South Park still appointment TV for anyone? Edgy is getting old. Edgy needs to be replaced.

So maybe you see why I'm not sharing the media's love affair with Sarah Silverman. But in desperate times, like when I'm forced to consider whether she is a bigot or a "meta-bigot" (see Slate.com again), I comfort myself with the knowledge that this can't last and her time in the sun is going to end. Just let it be soon.