Sarah Silverman retired her ‘arrogant ignorant’ character because Trump ’embodies that completely’

Sarah Silverman is a comedian who changes with the times, and in a new interview, she discusses why she dropped her “Sarah Silverman” character amid the rise of former president Donald Trump.

As a guest on Fail Better with David Duchovny, a Lemonada Media production, Silverman went into the transient nature of comedy as an art form and how her decision to move away from the “arrogant ignorant” character she rode to fame was not simply a reaction to audiences “not laughing at my racist jokes anymore.”

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“It wasn’t really a conscious, Hey, that stuff doesn’t work, so I’m going to go a different way,” Silverman told Duchovny. “I think I just very naturally started changing. My first comedy special, Jesus Is Magic, is like, ‘I’m Sarah Silverman, but I’m totally doing a character’ and that character — it carried on into my Comedy Central show, The Sarah Silverman Program — was an arrogant ignorant.”

She continued, “So having Trump win, not that it carried through up until Trump was elected, but especially when Trump was elected and how the world changed in that way, that character was no longer really amusing to me because he embodies that completely.”

Silverman went on to liken comedy to a painting, that if you go see it every day in a museum, it changes because you change, noting that “in some ways” her old stuff “doesn’t hold up” anymore.

“Comedy really dies in the second-guessing of your audience,” she elaborated. “You really have to stay with what is funny to you and that hopefully changes over time because it means you’ve grown, or you’ve changed, or the world has changed and you’ve changed with it, or the world has changed and you haven’t changed with it.”

It’s a hard lesson that not all comedians learn, or believe in, for that matter, but a huge part of what’s considered funny in any given time is its relevance. And nothing and no one stays relevant forever — comedians or former presidents alike.