Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman was hired as a writer and cast member on Saturday Night Live for its nineteenth season, in 1993, and was gone within a year. The act she built afterwards ran on one specific trick: a bright, untroubled delivery attached to material about racism, religion and sex, with the joke landing on the character saying it rather than on the subject itself.

The Sarah Silverman Program, which she starred in and produced from 2007 to 2010, is that persona handed a sitcom to wreck, and it brought her an Emmy nomination for lead actress in a comedy. She published a memoir, The Bedwetter, in 2010.

The screen career since has gone in two directions at once. Disney gave her Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet, and the voice work is better than it had to be, because she plays the child as genuinely irritating rather than adorable, which is the only reason the friendship at the centre lands. In the other direction, I Smile Back asked her to play an addicted suburban mother in a drama with no jokes anywhere in it, and she does it with no protective irony at all.

Between those poles sits a long run of scene-stealing single appearances, the sarcastic co-worker or the terrible ex, and more recently a move into ordinary supporting work in films like Battle of the Sexes and Maestro, where nobody is asking her to be the funniest person on screen.