Silverman takes heat for dissing Spears tots

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on September 26th, 2007

Sarah Silverman is taking some heat for her monologue at the MTV Video Music Awards, specifically for the gags about Britney Spears’ young sons.

“The joke that everyone was upset about– me calling the kids ‘adorable mistakes’– was the most innocuous joke,” the 36-year-old comedian tells Us Weekly magazine in the issue that comes out Friday. “It never occurred to me that would be deemed hurtful or over the line.”

Silverman is asking us to swallow a lot here. The joke is far from innocuous. (Perhaps she doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.)

It’s usually a good idea– even for someone who has a reputation for being edgy, blasphemous and outrageous– to, at the very least, lay off the kids! If the critics were to give Silverman heat for jokes about adults, no matter how cruel or off-color those jokes might be, we’d probably be among the first to defend her. But there are tens of thousands of kids and adults in therapy right now because someone implied or explicitly stated that they were “mistakes!” They are public figures, but only in the strictest sense of the phrase. As such, they should be deemed off-limits, even for the sharpest of wits, even at the sleaziest of events.

Rather than take the route she has, Silverman would have been better off comparing any possible damage from her jibe to the real harm that mom might be inflicting on the tykes.

Aside from that, US Weekly in particular and Hollywood in general has some nerve coming down on a comedian after all the abuse they’ve heaped on “The Pop Tart” prior to and during her rather public and excruciating meltdown. The 25-year-old former Mousketeer is obviously in a hell we can only imagine. After a while, it might be best to totally ignore her, rather than exacerbate her situation.