"I don’t think of myself as being PC out of fear" - Sarah Silverman on saying the N-word earlier in her career

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Sarah Silverman admitted that she was "f*cking ignorant" early on in her career when she used the N-word in her comedy sketches. While reflecting on her comedy in her early career, Silverman said,

"I felt like the temperature of the world around me at the time was, 'We are all liberal so we can say the n-word. We aren't racist, so we can say this derogatory stuff. I was playing a character that was arrogant and ignorant, so I thought it was OK. Lookng back, my intentions were always good, but they were f*cking ignorant."

The comedian had earlier admitted to using racial slurs in her comedy special back in 2005, Jesus is Magic. Silverman had also used a slur, directed at people of Chinese descent, back in a 2001 appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

While speaking to Rolling Stone, Silverman added that she now sees herself as more "PC."

"I don't think of myself as being PC out of fear. Some people got made at me for apologizing. I only did that because I was sorry. That's a really great rule of thumb. Only apologize when you're sorry. Always apologize when you're sorry."

"Comedy is not evergreen," says Sarah Silverman

Her recent interaction with Rolling Stone is not the first time Sarah Silverman has addressed her use of racial slurs in comedy early in her career. While appearing on the CBC podcast, Q with Tim Power, on March 8, 2023, Silverman cringed at the use of racial slurs in her old comedy sketches and said,

"Comedy is not evergreen. If you're not looking back at what you did 10 years ago and cringing, you're probably doing something wrong, in my view. I mean, look, my first special is problematic in 18 different ways. Is there funny stuff? Absolutely. There's, like, N-word, hard R, you know, the R-word, the M-word for little person."

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Silverman addressed that she was admitting not out of fear but "out of being mindful." Her other problematic comedy sketches also included appearing as blackface during an episode of The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central in 2007, where she played a fictionalized version of herself with her face painted black to determine if it's harder to be Black or Jewish.

Silverman was terminated from a film in 2007, after an image of her Blackface episode resurfaced on the internet. She released her memoir, Bedwetter, in 2010, discussing her comedic approach and the controversies surrounding her.

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