Like a cheerier version of Jeremy Renner’s demolitions expert in The Hurt Locker, Sarah Silverman is the kind of comedian who loves nothing better than venturing into the treacherous topics of race, sex, and religion to nimbly navigate some potentially explosive stuff. So, after taking her envelope-pushing comedy to television with Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program and warming up the Internet with her YouTube videos “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” and “Sell The Vatican, Feed The World,” Silverman next takes on that most daring, forward-thinking medium known as…book publishing. She makes her literary debut next week with The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which will be published by HarperCollins, and once again boundaries are pushed. In addition to a foreword and an afterword, Silverman’s book contains what may be the first “midword” in publishing history. That she spends a nice chunk of that section biting the hand that edited her will probably make her a literary hero among downtrodden and emasculated writers. But what’s most surprising about Silverman’s book is that it doesn’t just go for laughs. Instead of a series of comic passages held together with crazy glue, she deftly mixes the spit-take funny stuff with an unsentimental but enlightened look back at her not-so-charmed life and career. The book’s title is a reference to the chronic enuresis that plagued Silverman into her teens, but Silverman also writes about dealing with severe depression and, as a result, a seriously misprescribed Xanax regimen. And though she professes to not enjoy deconstructing comedy, Silverman is quite good, both in her writing and our conversation below, at analyzing controversial moments in her comedy career, such as time in 2001 when she used the word “Chink” in a joke about racism on Conan O’Brien’s show—as she writes in her book, a last-minute substitute when she was told that her original word choice, “nigger,” would not fly on network TV—and incurred the wrath of Asian Americans who misinterpreted the joke. Fans who appreciate Silverman’s love of poo and penis jokes won’t be disappointed either—she’s even included a rather bizarre photo of the genitalia of one of her writers. The Bedwetter is a one-stop guide to understanding Silverman.

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