Keep in mind, Silverman was a child when this happened.
My question to you is:
Can you remember a time in your life when you said something you thought was funny that really hurt someone else's feelings? What did that change in you as a person? Did it make you more sensitive to other people? Did it give your comedic instinct a filter? Or, are you still the same person who will say just about anything for a laugh?
What do you make of a person who seeks the laughter of others on a constant basis?
The following piece is taken from Sarah Silverman's new book, "Bedwetter: Stories Of Courage, Redemption and Pee". It is a cautionary tale about the nature of how one comic learns, at a very young age, that some comedy goes too far.
The First Time I Bombed
My parents' second child, Jeffrey Michael Silverman, was born on February 9, 1965. That May, Donald and Beth Ann went to New York City to take their cruise to Bermuda, after which they returned to New York to spend the weekend at the World's Fair in Flushing, with their friends Ellie and Harry Bluestein before heading home to New Hampshire. Susie, who had just turned two, was staying with my mother's parents in Connecticut, and the baby, Jeffrey, was in Concord with my father's parents (Nana and Papa), Rose and Max. When they arrived at their hotel near the fairgrounds in Flushing, my father called his parents to check on Jeffrey.
My mother heard my father say, "Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone'? Where is he?"
She walked over to him, "What's going on?"
He listened a few moments longer, then collapsed into tears, which curled into wails of despair. Jeffrey was dead.
Donald and Beth Ann arrived at the Concord house, where many friends had gathered around weeping, inconsolable Rose and Max. When Max looked up and saw my parents, he cried out, "How can you forgive me?"
My parents were told that Jeffrey had been crying a lot during the night and that Papa was the one to keep checking on him, since Nana was hard of hearing and couldn't hear him cry. In the morning Papa got up and went to look in on the baby. He got to the crib and didn't see him. He called to Nana, saying, "Rose, where's the baby?" Then they both found him, down in one corner of the port-a-crib. The metal support frame had slipped off its peg, allowing a little narrow space between the mattress and the bottom rail of the crib. My parents were told that he had strangled in that space.
Any concept of closure, if it existed in the '60s at all, was a notion invented by hippie fruits. My parents' friends cleaned up any sign of Jeffrey's existence by the time they got home. He was imagined.
* * *
In 1976 I was five and cute as a really hairy button. My eldest sister, Susie, was twelve. She was fair with very long dark brown hair and big brown sad eyes reflecting a heartbreaking need for love—by any means necessary.
When I was three she would babysit me and say, "If I drink this orange juice I'm gonna turn into a monster!"
I'd cry, "Susie no!" But she drank the juice anyway, went into the closet where the washer-dryer was, put a brown suede ski mask on her head, and came back out, monstrafied.
"RAAAAARGH!! The only way I'll turn back to Susie is if you hug me!!!"
Terrified, I ran in a burst toward the monster, hugging her, eyes clenched.
Susie once pulled a steak knife out of the silverware drawer, turned to me, and mused, "It's so weird, like, I could kill you right now. Like, I wouldn't, but I could. I could just take your life . . ." One way to interpret this is that it foretold her eventual future as a rabbi. At age fourteen, here she was, already pondering the biggest issues of the human condition—life, death, morality, and the choices we must make. An alternate interpretation is that living with me eventually causes one to contemplate murder. But I'm feeling the former explanation is the right one, as it is a scientific certainty that I'm pretty adorable.
* * *
Laura was in the middle. She was eleven. A tomboy, she looked just like Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
She had olive skin with bright green almond-shaped eyes, and dimples on either side of her perfect smile. A lot went on inside her, which she mostly kept to herself. She was popular, smart, and could play any instrument she picked up without a single lesson.
* * *
We moved from Manchester, the biggest city in New Hampshire, to Bedford, New Hampshire—a small town of about twelve thousand people. We lived on a big lot of land—an old farm with a big barn where we would spend our summer days playing. One afternoon, Susie sat us down and told us the story of our brother, Jeffrey. She spoke with the measure and drama of a campfire ghost story.
It was chilling and shocking and tragic, but mostly it was exciting, as most ghost stories are. And like only the best ones, it lived in the front of my mind for a long time after.
* * *
At this point I was on a tear with the zingers—killing with my parents and sisters, strangers in markets—just being five and saying, "I love tampons!" or any shocking non sequitur was rewarded with "Oh my gods" through frenzied laughter. The approval made me dance uncontrollably like Snoopy. The feeling of pride made my arms itch. It fed this tyrant in me that just wanted more more more push push push. So when Nana picked us up to go to Weeks' Restaurant for lunch, as she did every Sunday, we got into her big boat, a dark blue Cadillac Seville with a beige leather interior, filled with the odor of stale cigarettes—a smell I loved because it meant "Nana." As all grandkids are to grandmas, we were her world. Before starting the car she bellowed, "Everyone put their seat belts on!" and without a beat I said . . .
(... oh this is going to be GREAT ...)
"Yeah—put yer seat belts on—you don't wanna end up like Jeffrey!"
Crickets. No one was even breathing. Susie and Laura looked at me with wide, angry eyes. And after several excruciating seconds, Nana broke the silence with an explosion of sobs.
Four words swam in my head—the most grown-up arrangement so far in my five years:
What have I done?
