Sarah Silverman’s Abortion Tweet Angers, Offends Critics

Sarah Silverman’s comedic style isn’t for everyone, and throughout her career, the 41-year-old comedienne has managed to be at the center of a few controversies.

Now that we have Twitter, Silverman’s deadpan brand of humor can be beamed to and offend a far larger number of people, and the actress and stand-up has managed to kickstart another fake-outrage battle in the “war against women.” It seems many opponents of abortion were bothered by a recent Twitter joke that Silverman made about abortion, even though the comments were clearly satire from start to finish.

The pic above is Silverman’s jab at the endless number of similar pics that proliferate on sites like Facebook and Twitter, wherein pregnant women who seem to think people are interested in viewing their bare abdominal regions post sometimes monthly (or even more boringly, weekly) pictures during their pregnancies.

Silverman coupled the pic with a joke, tweeting “it’s a burrito!” Not hilariously funny, but that also was only the setup. Silverman updated shortly thereafter with a second photo, where her normally-fit body looks markedly slimmer and quips, “Got a quickie aborsh in case R v W gets overturned.”

Again, neither joke is particularly funny on its face, but it is subversive. And though the tweets were posted on April 12th (and remain up on her Twitter account), the controversy has only really become high-profile today. Which makes so little sense in so many ways- it’s clear Silverman was not referring to any actual abortions, the images don’t even vaguely represent the reality of the procedure, and the “joke” aspect is fairly obvious.

Silverman is currently being considered to head up a TV show on NBC in the fall.