‘F***ING IGNORANT’

Sarah Silverman Addresses Using ‘N-Word’ on Stage

“Looking back, my intentions were always good,” the comedian insists.

Sarah Silverman really wishes she didn’t use the n-word on stage, she told Rolling Stone in a new interview to promote her Netflix special PostMortem. Silverman was referring to a joke from her 2005 special Jesus is Magic, during which she quips she didn’t perform her “edgy and hip” joke that “had the word n----- in it” because she was “afraid” of a table of Black audience members, so instead she changed “that joke to ch---s.” Two years later Silverman drew yet more ire for donning blackface in an episode of her show The Sarah Silverman Program. She faced swift backlash for using the racial epithets, which she’s now said she regrets. “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,” she explained to Rolling Stone. “‘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. Looking back, my intentions were always good, but they were f---ing ignorant.” The comedian added that she’s not “being PC out of fear,” and only apologized in the past for racial insensitivity in her comedy because she’s genuinely “sorry.”