Sarah Silverman elicited puzzlement and praise with her debut on German television.
“She sits on the potty and says, ‘Anyone who watches a Jewish woman on the toilet is as bad as a Holocaust denier,” Joachim Huber wrote in the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel newspaper the day after the American Jewish comedian appeared Oct. 23 on Comedy Central.
“Is this supposed to be funny?” he asked.
In her sketches the acid-tongued Silverman, 37, mocks minority groups, including Jews.
Her recent video spot for U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama has sent young Jews “schlepping” to Florida to win over their grandparents.
Huber compared Silverman to the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Borat character also broke seemingly unbreakable taboos. “Both remind the viewer of taboos that they did not even know they had,” Huber said. “They are the wake-up call for post-modern scatological humor.” “Black humor is coming to Germany,” said Die Welt journalist Antje Hildebrandt while complaining that the show unfortunately is dubbed into German. “If a woman is already flouting all the PC rules, then it would be nicer to hear this cacophony in the original.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
