Comedian Sarah Silverman revealed in an interview last week that a 2007 blackface sketch got her fired from a movie. The sketch, in which Silverman painted her face black to see if it was harder to be black or Jewish, is something Silverman has said she seriously regrets. “I recently was going to do a movie ... a really sweet part and a cool little movie,” she said on The Bill Simmons Podcast. “Then at 11 p.m. the night before, they fired me because they saw that picture of me in blackface from that episode. So they hired someone else who’s wonderful but who’s never stuck her neck out.” Silverman added: “It was so disheartening, it just made me real, real sad because I’ve kind of devoted my life to making it right.” In 2018, Silverman told GQ magazine that she doesn’t “stand by the blackface sketch.” “I’m horrified by it, and I can’t erase it,” she said. “I can only be changed by it and move on.”
This isn’t the first blast from the past Silverman’s had to address. Last year, her old tweet related to child molestation came under fire. “Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move?” she tweeted in 2009. She responded to the criticism by saying that joke was “from a time not that long ago when hard absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were—jokes—not a disingenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls.” Silverman’s been a frequent critic of Donald Trump and has spoken in favor of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders.
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