Comedian Sarah Silverman was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1970. The first time she ever performed stand-up comedy was in Boston when she was 17, which she described as an “awful” performance (just like most comedians’ first performances). Despite this, she loved it enough to drop out of New York University and pursue comedy full-time in Greenwich Village, first performing professionaly in 1992 when she was in her early twenties.

The following year she was hired as a writer and a featured player on Saturday Night Live for a single season (although only one of her sketches made it to dress rehearsal and none of them made it to air). Silverman has a unique comedic voice and SNL was not in tune with it. She was still really young when she got hired there and when she got fired after one year it damaged her confidence, but she later said that she wasn’t ready for that job when she got it anyway. Plus the experience toughened her up and made her want to work even harder on her comedy, so she is now grateful for having gone through it.

Luckily she has had a lot of big breaks since then that have really elevated her status in the comedy world. Including when Garry Shandling hired her to play a staff writer whose writing skills are undermined due to sexism on The Larry Sanders Show. This was a recurring character who appeared several times during the show’s final two seasons. Silverman also had success as a recurring player from 1995 to 1997 on the HBO sketch comedy series Mr. Show (which was co-created by her former SNL co-worker Bob Odenkirk who thought Silverman’s potential was being wasted on SNL). During her final year on that show she performed stand-up comedy on network television for the first time when she appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. Silverman also had guest roles on shows like Star Trek: Voyager, Seinfeld, JAG, Dr. Katz, Futurama, Frasier, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Entourage, Monk, Robot Chicken, The Simpsons, The Good Wife, Childrens Hospital, The League, Bob’s Burgers, Louie, Masters of Sex and The Daily Show, for which she guest hosted in 2023.

Silverman’s first main role was as network executive Gil Bender in the short-lived FOX sitcom Greg the Bunny (2002). That was followed by a recurring role in another puppet show called Crank Yankers (2002-07) for which she played an obnoxious college student named Hadassah Guberman.

Comedy Central was also where Silverman got her first lead role when she teamed up with Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab to create the bizarre but funny The Sarah Silverman Program, which aired for 3 seasons from 2007 to 2010 and starred Silverman as the immature and impulsive Sarah, a fictionalized version of herself who often sings her way through life and hates it when people kill her buzz by telling her to get a job. The show co-starred Brian Posehn, Steve Agee, Jay Johnston and her actual sister Laura Silverman as her fictional sister who is also named Laura. The sitcom received praise for its offbeat but hilarious approach to storytelling, with the New Yorker calling it one of the meanest and one of the funniest sitcoms in years. Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for her performance on that show.

Around 2016 Silverman started becoming more politically active (first endorsing Bernie Sanders for president and then endorsing Hillary Clinton) before hosting her own talk show on Hulu called I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman from 2017 to 2018, in which she travelled around the country talking to different kinds of Americans across the political spectrum searching for common ground at the backdrop of an increasingly divided nation.

In addition to her prolific TV work, Silverman has also acted in several movies. The first of which she co-produced with Charles Fisher and was called Who’s the Caboose? (1997), a comedy centered on a romantic couple played by Silverman and co-writer, director and star Sam Seder, who attempt to secure a TV role during “pilot season” (the period of the TV season when producers cast new shows). The film co-starred many comedians who were not yet famous, including H. Jon Benjamin, David Cross, Andy Kindler, Kathy Griffin and Marc Maron.

Other minor or supporting film roles Silverman has had include Bulworth (1998), There’s Something About Mary (1998), Evolution (2001), School of Rock (2003), Bad Santa (2003), Funny People (2009) and The Muppets (2011). Her roles started getting bigger and sometimes more dramatic beginning in the 2010s when she played a recovering alcoholic named Geraldine in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) opposite Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen.

After that she voiced Vanellope von Schweetz in Disney’s animated film Wreck-It Ralph (2012). A video game character in a racing game called Sugar Rush who accidentally and mysteriously causes the game to glitch and who undergoes a well-executed character arc from annoying pesk to empathetic victim. Both the character and the film proved popular with audiences and critics and Silverman would reprise the role in the 2018 sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet.

In 2015 Silverman took a risky leap playing the lead in an independent drama called I Smile Back about a wife and mother played by Silverman who suffers from mental illness and addiction. Most critics said the film itself could have been executed better, but many of those same critics praised Silverman’s powerful dramatic turn.

Silverman continued to star in a variety of films ranging from comedy to drama, including the Lonely Island mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), the Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs tennis biodrama Battle of the Sexes (2017), Adam McKay’s political satire Don’t Look Up (2021), Jennifer Lopez rom-com Marry Me (2022) and Bradley Cooper’s seven-time Oscar nominated Leonard Bernstein biodrama Maestro (2023) in which Silverman played Leonard’s sister Shirley Bernstein.

But the biggest focus of Sarah Silverman’s life seems to be dedicated less to film and television and more to her weekly podcast The Sarah Silverman Podcast (which I listen to on Spotify regularly) and of course her stand-up comedy, which is the thing that launched her career in the first place. She has filmed four specials so far: the theatrically released Jesus Is Magic (2005), We Are Miracles (2013, HBO), A Speck of Dust (2017, Netflix) and Someone You Love (2023, HBO) with a fifth special on the way to Netflix this month called Postmortem (in which she is expected to make comedy out of tragedy as she discusses the death of her parents).

Silverman’s comedy is definitely not for everyone. Even I have found her too juvenile every now and then in the past. But I think each of her specials have progressively gotten sharper and more funny, and even when she’s not making jokes and I’m just listening to her talk about her life and answer voice mails from her fans, she’s impossible not to love. Yes there is a bit of truth to the optimistic child-in-an-adult-body persona that she embodies in her comedy, but you can also tell that she’s very smart. Almost as if she has utilized her silliness and her smartness to build her career into the success that it is.