Comedian Chelsea Handler has written three memoirs. Kathy Griffin wrote one, too. And now comes “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee” by the most subversive of stand-up comics, Sarah Silverman.
But Silverman, as always, is an outlier. Griffin begs us to like her. Handler doesn’t care one way or the other. But Silverman dares us to like her and tries to make it as hard as possible.
“My teeth were bigger than my face, I was coated in hair, and I smelled like pee,” she writes of herself in childhood, when she was sent to summer camp even though she was a chronic bedwetter. “Of course, most events in life are about context. Had my parents instead sent me to live in the Baboon Reserve at the Bronx Zoo, I would have been happy and confident, judging the others for flinging poo and feeling downright aristocratic.”
“The Bedwetter” is meant to be funny, and it is. But the book is not merely a collection of “fart jokes and blasphemy.”
For example, she writes about the death of her parents’ second child, a baby boy named Jeffrey who accidentally suffocated in his crib while in the care of his grandparents. The family coped with the tragedy, which happened before Sarah was born, by ignoring it.
When Sarah was 5, she and her sisters were out for a drive with their Nana, the same grandmother who had discovered the dead baby in his crib. Nana told the girls to put on their seat belts. Sarah was already a budding comic: “[W]ithout a beat I said … ‘Yeah — put yer seatbelts on — you don’t wanna end up like Jeffrey!’ ” She expected an appreciative laugh, but her joke was greeted with stunned silence. “And after several excruciating seconds, Nana broke the silence with an explosion of sobs.”
Like so many other stand-up comics, Silverman trades on her Jewishness — or, as she puts it, her “Jewiness” — but makes no concessions to Jewish sensibilities.
Here’s what she writes about her publisher’s response to her suggested title for the book: “[T]o say they were underwhelmed by ‘Tales of a Horse-Faced Jew-Monkey’ would be like saying that Hitler was underwhelmed by the Jews.”
She cracks a joke about one of her sisters — a rabbi who lives on a kibbutz in Israel — by pointing out that she married a man named Abramowitz. “When I was on ‘SNL,’ I did a bit about this for ‘Weekend Update,’ in which I suggested that my sister and her husband just rename themselves ‘The Jews.’ ”
And when she devotes a whole chapter to her Jewish identity, it is only because, as she writes, “my Jew editor convinced me to write a chapter on Jewiness by using one of our culture’s greatest tools of persuasion: nagging.”
Silverman argues that her scatological humor ought to be especially appealing to a Jewish audience. “[M]any Jews cannot be stopped from discussing what goes on in their GI tracts — the GI tract of a Jew over age 23 is a true melodrama reminiscent of the Old Testament: sudden mass exodus, long arduous journeys, floods, futility, agony, questioning God’s wisdom and lactose intolerance,” she writes. “So the things I talk about are not blasphemy to Jewish people.”
Curiously, but tellingly, Silverman seems to lose interest in the whole project about halfway through the book, barely mentioning, for example, her famously failed romance with Jimmy Kimmel.
“I’m not writing this book to share wisdom or to inspire people,” she writes. “I’m writing this book because I am a famous comedian, which is how it works now. If you’re famous, you get to write a book, and not the other way around, so the next Dave Eggers better get a TV show or kill someone or something.”
Jonathan Kirsch is book editor for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
“The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee” by Sarah Silverman (256 pages, Harper, $25.99)