5 Feet of Fury

‘Some thoughts on the celebrity of Sarah Silverman’

Kevin D. Williamson writes:

The convention that Miss Silverman embodies is the great American fiction that there exist in our debased culture certain taboos surrounded by social borders that only the bravest and — inevitable word — edgiest of our artists are equipped to trespass.

The unmentioned irony is that such real taboos as remain to us go largely unspoken of (that is the nature of taboos), while the ritual violation of ersatz taboos is carried out according to carefully cultivated social convention.