Bryn Elise Sandberg at The Hollywood Reporter offered news from the Television Critics Association summer press tour that leftist comic Sarah Silverman has been granted a ten-part weekly variety series on Hulu titled I Love You, America. In an effort to confound expectations that this is going to be another unfunny rantfest against Trump and the Republicans – like Samantha Bee’s TBS show – Silverman claimed it would be “aggressively dumb” and not very political.
"It’s funny when I read about what the show is. People are going to be wildly disappointed. It’s not like we deal with politics and politicians," Silverman claimed. "The way in which it is political is that everything is political right now just by virtue of it being made in this period of time…."
"What I realized is that it doesn’t have to be, 'Look at this deep moment we did where we connected with these people and it’s really smart and it’s moving and look at it.' I feel like the reaction to that if I were the audience would be, 'F--k you,'" said Silverman. "But what is really important is that it will be funny and silly and aggressively dumb, which is my favorite kind of comedy. And anything smart that’s in there will be served in a big, fat, bread-y sandwich of super, super dumb, because that’s how I like my comedy."
Before her debut, Samantha Bee also tried to be coy and say her show wouldn’t be a droning, bitter leftist hootenanny. It sounds like it will be like Chelsea Handler’s show, only aggressively dumber.
Silverman claims this is going to be non-divisive. "We pitched it, saying, 'With this show, I’m hoping to connect with un-likeminded people.' And networks went crazy because they haven’t heard anything like that before."
They claim the show will forego a house band in favor of “a focus group consisting of 12 people from various walks of life that will play an integral part throughout the series.”
Don’t buy it. They want to say “Hey, this humor is non-threatening to your anti-liberal point of view,” but they still want to convince anti-liberals that they’re being idiotic, and need to stroll over to the “right side of history.”
Note the contempt in Silverman’s pitch, insisting her opponents don’t believe in truth, or facts: “We may be getting our facts from very different places in a time where truth has no currency and facts don’t change minds, but I think comedy at its best can get people’s porcupine needles to go down."
Her executive producer, Adam McKay – who runs the leftist satire website Funny Or Die – shot back at critics who suggested this could be seen as another liberal Hollywood product. "I think one of the things about this show is that we want to get back to a grounded place, where we’re looking at not right versus left, but we’re looking at corruption versus honesty. We’re looking at the good of the whole versus the good of the few."
Yeah right: We’re not political, it’s just that conservatism is corrupt and liberalism represents honesty and common sense and humanity. Then he criticized Trump as a political pickpocket of sorts:
"What’s happened in this country versus the right and the left, it’s the greatest scam you could ever pull because if you wanted to pickpocket someone, what’s the best way to do it? Create a fake fight so everyone turns their head and rubbernecks, and then take their wallet," he said. "I always get very annoyed when people tell me I’m a liberal. I’m like, really? I just don’t want corruption. I just don’t want the banks to rip us all off. I don’t want to be lied in a war. How is that liberal? That’s just common sense."
