Networks tend to be Nurembergian nightmares where the buck stops nowhere and the right hand never seems to know what the left hand is doing. The problem in general with the network self-censorship system is that Standards and Practices are run by human beings. There is no algorithm for determining what is offensive. What qualifies as "offensive" is wildly specific to every individual's weird little brain.
Example #1: In one episode, Steve gets a massage and thinks that the offer of "full release" is an option for him to release his bowels (instead, of course, of the intended liberation of his balls' inner contents). To one of our particular censors, the sound of human feces hitting a massage table was acceptable, but only if that sound suggested that said feces were solid. If the sound suggested too high a liquid content, then we couldn't use it. Their rule of thumb in general is, "Can we defend this to potential complaining viewers or sponsors?" Look, I get it. Loose stools are grosser than solid ones. But the censor is using the context of her own life history with all her hang-ups to answer the question, "Is there a defensible ratio of fiber to water in this stool?"
Example #2: There's essentially no limit to how often we can say "penis," "balls," "scrotum," and "shaft," but female anatomical language is a big, flapping red flag (so to speak). In one episode from the most recent season, our town elects a new mayor. The mayor turns out to be a terrible homophobe and a lunatic who outlaws brunch. She is ultimately exposed to be a lesbian and a secret brunch eater. She attempts to defend herself in this soliloquy:
"Don't listen to her! She doesn't understand what she saw! I don't like brunch or gay sex! [Sighs.] Look, here's what I like, okay? It's this really specific thing. It's not gay. Just listen...I like to have a plate of scrambled eggs and onions on my chest, while there's a bushy vagina--mostly covered by panties, but still you can see some hairs escaping--hovering over me. Then I just stuff little chunks of the eggs and onions in my mouth, so I can have the taste of egg and onion, while I look at the bulge of the pubic hairs in the underwear, plus some of the escaping little hairs. Do you know what I mean?"
Standards told us the speech was too graphic, too vivid; "It really takes you right there, visually," they said. It was a long negotiation, but here is the version that was accepted:
"I like to have a plate of scrambled eggs and onions on my chest, while a woman's genitalia--mostly covered by panties, but not entirely--hovers over me. Then I just stuff little chunks of the eggs and onions in my mouth, so I can have the taste of egg and onion, while I look at the bulge of genitalia in the underwear. Do you know what I mean?"
It was cleansed of nearly all specificity about female anatomy. Their argument was that, in this case, the speech was referring to a sexual fetish, which necessitated less-vivid imagery. Okay. I guess that's understandable. But from another episode in the same cycle is a speech by Laura (my sister on the show and in real life):
"I found myself interested in some of the video-films specializing in gentlemen using their penises to have anal intercourse with costars of the same gender. After a few hours, I noticed that this act creates an expansion of the man's anal circumference. Much like--have you ever seen Flipper? His blowhole looks like a man's expanded orifice. In the following weeks, I found myself frequently desiring to see the end result of prolonged insertion on a man's 'blowhole.' I guess it's just, well, my cup of tea!"
In the interest of accuracy, this is the revised version of her speech. We'd been ordered to remove the words "gaping rectum." But nonetheless, it's WAY more graphic than the previous passage about scrambled eggs and female genitals. In the line below, my character has just been told by Laura that I'd been born with both a penis and a vagina. Devastated and stunned, I ask through tears,
"Were the penis and vagina in separate pieces, or was it like the penis itself was the vagina, but split down the middle with labia?"
According to the censor, "labia," in this instance, was too "graphic," and we were asked to remove it. Labia? Fucking seriously? We can say "penis" and "balls" until the cows come home, but labia? I asked our censor if this is what she wanted to teach young girls--that penis is fine and balls are funny but labia--your own body part--is dirty? It was not a stretch to me to view this as telling little girls to be ashamed of their bodies, which genuinely offended me. I expressed these feelings to the censor and prepared to dig in for a long battle. But to my surprise, she saw my point and acknowledged that she had grown up in Catholic schools where female sexual organs were viewed as taboo. I was so impressed by her willingness to admit that her upbringing was clouding her judgment. So congratulations, womankind: Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, and by the time this book is published, "labia" will have been in prime time.
This is the upside of having human beings as censors--some of them, like ours, are reasonable and willing to negotiate. Censors have an important job. You can't have complete lawlessness on a network, and the truth is that restrictions are very often good for creativity. Many times our jokes have been shot down by the censors, forcing us to write better ones. One script called for me to randomly belch the word "rape." S&P would not have it. We fought and fought and just flat-out lost. With no other choice, we pushed ourselves to find another belch-worthy word that would be as inappropriate and nonsensical as "rape." The writers huddled in the conference room with a pot of coffee and unbridled determination, and after several hours, we emerged with a word that not only measured up to "rape," but exceeded it--the perfect combination of phonics and imagery that, when burped, sounded even more retarded than our original choice. It was, "Zach Braff," and it was good.
I really respect the ladies (they're all female for some reason) at S&P. To have a job where half your day is spent saying no to--and then being attacked by--arrogant, wise-ass, self-important comedy writers, and to not completely lose your shit, you have to be a tough-skinned motherfucker.
TSSP hasn't incited mass outrage or lost sponsors. As far as I can figure, it has sparked only one controversy: when my character slept with God. For three years, we've pumped violence, farts, doody, genitals, relentless celebration of mind-altering drugs, racial provocation, and Holocaust humor into the basic cable atmosphere. I wore blackface for an entire episode and we never heard a word about it. Only when God (brilliantly played by Tucker Smallwood) was depicted having casual sex did people go apeshit. It's hard to say just exactly what bothered them about it--that God was portrayed as a black man? That he was having a one-night stand? That the one-night stand was a Jew? Or was it that after I had sex with him, I blew him off? Below is just a tiny sampling of the hate mail Comedy Central received after this episode aired:
* * *
Message: Sarah Silverman sleeping with God has to be the lowest form of crude humor I have ever heard of. She is talented, but she is deliberately offensive to Religion in general and Christians specifically. Why was it off limits to show Allah on South Park, but ok to show disrespect for God?--you are total hypocrites. I will no longer watch your station--
* * *
Message: I look forward to a most wonderful day...the day that people like you stand before a holy God and have to answer for this filthy trash. In the meantime, I have permanently blocked Comedy Central from my TV set and sent this article to all my friends. I'll bet you cowardly hypocrites wouldn't have the guts to show Muhammad in this situation.
* * *
Message: I find it not only blasphemous but extremely offensive that your Comedy Central Programming and Viacom allow Ms. Silverman the license to denigrate the beliefs of even marginally religious Christians and Jews. This is not humor--this is "hate speech" directed towards the Judeo-Christian community.
* * *
Message: I am absolutely disgusted by the lastest episode where it depicted Sarah having sex with a black "god". I can assure you I will no longer watch your network until you take such filth off the air. Not even South Park has gone this far before. It will be a sad day when Sarah stands before the Lord and has to account for what she
has done.
* * *
Message: SO THIS NO TALENT JEW CAN MAKE FUN OF OR TRY TO EMBARRESS CHRISTIANS? AND SO IT GOES. I WANT HER TO BASH THE JEWISH RELIGION OR MUSLIM RELIGION. NO? WHY NOT? HOW MANY PRODUCERS DID SHE SLEEP WITH FOR THIS DUMBASS SHOW? OOPPSSS? HEY THE 1ST AMMENDMENT GOES BOTH WAYS...RIGHT NO TALENT SARAH?
* * *
Message: hi, that sarah silverman show is hilarious. it's amazing--the wonders of special effects nowadays. who would have thought you could take a monkey and make it act like it's humping a jew with words coming out of the monkey and everything. it looked so real. did she actually touch the monkey. did it bite her? she certainly is a brave woman. that monkey sure must have stunk. he looked stinky. what do you feed it? what an actress she is! bravo!!!
* * *
I'll take this opportunity to answer one of the most repeated questions: Why didn't I choose to depict Muhammad having sex? The answer is simple: I don't want to get blown up with explosives. I am afraid of angering Muslims, but not afraid of angering Jews and Christians, so I chose to depict the Judeo-Christian God instead. It seems extremely obvious to me, but so many people asked...
There's a strange coda to this story. For as much anger as the sex-with-God bit caused, there was an equal amount of praise. For people who loved the pilot, this part of the episode was their favorite. After the first season, so many fans would ask me, "Is God coming back??" The writers and I felt we owed it to the viewers, so we wrote an entire episode for HIM in season two. His buffoonery in this episode dwarfed that of his first appearance. He was desperate, needy, and clingy. He smoked weed, got paranoid and insecure, accidentally killed a man, pathetically covered it up, and took a completely cavalier attitude about it. He got sloppy drunk, made a fool of himself at my high school reunion, and tumbled down a cartoonishly long flight of stairs. I dumped him, after which he immediately begged to just sleep in my bed with me. Serious douche-chill-inducing stuff. And yet, we never heard a word about this episode--not a single letter. Maybe all those people who threatened to yank out their cable boxes after the pilot actually went through with it.
The censors were nervous about a scene in which my character is asked for her driver's license and instead offers a shitty drawing of a penis. We had to clear the drawing with Standards before shooting. After receiving this fax, they asked us to lose the "demarcation of the head" and "shorten the pee hole." Note that our stationery at the time still reflected the show's original title, with the fancy French spelling of "Program."
* * *
Mein Kampf, Part Five: Writers' Guild Strike a Real Pain in the Kampf
* * *
I suspect that the show I turned in to Comedy Central is not quite the one they originally hoped for. My guess is that the show they really wanted was one in which I did stand-up and peppered it with a couple of sketches and songs, possibly all riffing on one overarching theme. That is pretty much what most of the network's other comedian-centered shows are like. It's a format that originally started with The Man Show and found wild success with Chappelle's show and Mind of Mencia. It's a show that's inexpensive and easy to produce in large quantities. Instead, I burdened them with a lavish show filled with union-wage workers, ensemble cast, stunts, special effects, visual effects, and animation.
Most network sitcoms churn out twenty-two or more episodes a year within a forty-week period, with almost no breaks. While the actors are downstairs shooting one week's episode, the writers are upstairs laboring frantically to get next week's script finished on time. Personally, I couldn't run my show like that and still maintain quality in writing or performance. I'm not saying it can't be done--it clearly can--I'm just saying I can't do it. For me it would be torture. Not "torture" like when the CIA extradites terror suspects to Yemen and the interrogators send 100,000 volts of electricity through their balls, but I'd be very grouchy.
The Sarah Silverman Program operates differently. We do the show one phase at a time. First we gather and write steadily--from 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., for three months. Together we pitch ideas for storylines, then figure out the detailed beats to each act (there are four acts per episode, divided by commercial breaks). Once an outline is completed, we usually assign the actual script to the writer who originally came up with the germ of the idea for the episode. Once written, Dan Sterling, Rob Schrab, and I will give notes. After the notes are addressed, Dan will do a final pass and make it perfect. Only once we've put a bow on all the scripts for the season do we begin shooting them.
I think our process has paid off. It's striking how often people visit us and remark on what a happy and fun place our set seems to be--and it is. My hope is that this happiness comes across to the viewer. Growing up, I loved seeing actors on screen who seemed to be enjoying their work in real life. Watching Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, I could feel their chemistry and delight in playing off each other. You could tell they were friends. It was the same thing with The Carol Burnett Show: My favorite part was when the cast members would crack each other up and knock the whole scene off the rails.
From the beginning, the network has expressed their frustrations with me about the production headaches and costs of my show, and I imagine that, by now, four years into it, there must be a secret little room at their corporate offices that contains nothing but a tile floor with a photo image of my face, and a urine drain right where my mouth is.
Because virtually everyone else who worked on the show was covered by a union except the writers, I asked for them to be unionized. They were talented and devoted, I couldn't do the show without them, and despite the increased production costs, they deserved the health care, pensions, and other basic protections that the guys who painted our sets enjoyed. Comedy Central stepped up, made a pact with the Writers' Guild, and began paying the writers union rates. Of course, just weeks after the writing staff unionized, the show was forced to shut down and join the devastating one-hundred-day writers' strike. Eep.
Writer "Tall Jon" Schroeder and me picketing during the writers' strike
Chris Romano atop Tall Jon with Dan Sterling crushed below
The strike was brutal for Comedy Central, just as it was brutal for everyone else. The ones hurt the most from the strike were those who had nothing to gain from it--the people involved in every part of production, from wardrobe to lights to catering, were out of work with no hope of a silver lining.
Even after the strike ended, the tone throughout Hollywood had changed. Cost cutting was the order of the day, and few shows, even successful ones, were impervious to the new industry-wide paradigm. After our season finished airing, the network informed us that the only way the show could be renewed was if we cut the budget by 30 percent.
All of us--Rob Schrab, Dan Sterling, our other executive producer, Heidi Herzon, and me--wanted to keep going with the series. In two seasons across the span of over two years, we had so far produced only twenty-two episodes. We felt we were just beginning to hit our stride creatively. So Rob, Dan, Heidi, and I agreed: We'd find a way to deliver the show at nearly two-thirds the cost, assuming we could do it without turning it into a completely insulting piece of shit.
Writer Jon Schroeder and head writer Dan Sterling. Tall Jon lost a bet with Jimmy Kimmel Live head writer Gary Greenberg over when the strike would end and happily wore this carefully chosen outfit for the day. We were all excited to be back at work.
For six weeks, we crunched numbers and explored endless scenarios. We begged the unions to give us a break on wage hikes, but they wouldn't budge. Comedy Central suggested we produce the show more like broadcast networks do it--write and shoot the show simultaneously as opposed to successively--because that would make it faster and therefore cheaper. But it also would have made it impossible for me to be in the writers' room. Look, I know the show is retarded, but much of that retardedness comes from my retarded head. Not to brag.
The network's most repeated demand was that we shoot more weeks in a row with fewer hiatuses. It'
s not a crazy demand--it's how most shows are done and it would have saved tons of money--faster is cheaper. But seriously, I would have fucking died. I was born with many advantages in life, but boundless energy and an ironclad immune system were not among them. Had we compressed the shooting schedule, I would have gotten sick, my performance in every capacity would have suffered greatly, and worst of all, I'd have become a gigantic cunt. I didn't want to disappoint my partners in crime, but I had no choice. I had to hold fast to the principles Garry Shandling had instilled in me years before: understanding my limits, and taking on only as much as I could without compromising quality of work or life.
After six weeks, we still couldn't make the budget. The network somehow managed to scrape up a little more money, but we were warned that this was the absolute end of the road.
Rob, Dan, Heidi, and I were all so stressed and exhausted from weeks of banging our heads against the wall--none of us could figure out how to do the show within the given budget. We agreed that there would be better things down the road for all of us, and that the universe was sending us a message: It was time for the show to end. I drafted an e-mail to Comedy Central and ran it by the others. They told me to send it: