Girl Wins Award

Photograph of Allison Silverman by Jemal Countess/Getty Images.

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Earlier this month, Allison Silverman, former executive producer of The Colbert Report, received the Muse Award from New York Women in Film & Television. This is the speech she gave.

I’m so happy to be here with you in 2009, and not in 18th century Scotland where we would all be decried as witches.

I am humbled by the Muse Award. As many of you know, until now I was deemed a muse only by Nashville superstar Billy Currington, who used me as the model for his hit song “That’s How Country Boys Roll.”

But it feels very natural being honored by New York Women in Film & Television.

To begin with, I live in New York. In gritty Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where the grit actually comes from the unwashed organic kale we pick up once a week to braise with pancetta and caramelized onions.

I am a woman. I know that primarily because of how strongly I relate to commercials for yogurt.

I am not technically in film, but I am often coated in a thin film of scented moisturizer to hide my revolting natural odor.

And I am in television. I have written and produced late night shows for the last 10 years, and thanks to this award, I think I may finally be able to say, “Well, Allison, you really showed them.”

Who are them?

I don’t know. But them don’t want to believe in me. Them have made that pretty clear over the years.

I am thrilled to be alongside such gifted women as America Ferrera, Andrea Wong, the team at Chicken & Egg Pictures, and perhaps especially Julianna Margulies.

You see, I grew up with curly hair in Gainesville, Fla., the second-most humid city in the United States. It’s not easy having curly hair in a town with an average of 91 percent humidity. I figure if there’s a bigger fan of Julianna Margulies as Carol Hathaway out there, she would have to have hair curlier than mine and live in the No. 1 most humid city, Quillayute, Wash., but I’ve done the research and there are no synagogues there, so I think I’m in the clear.

There are so many things I was planning to talk to you about today. How it’s the male bowerbird who spends hours tending his ornamental garden to impress his mate; why the Russian space dogs were all female; whether letting friends stay at your place over Christmas is a holiday don’t.

But something happened last week. I had a pitch on Friday, and the day before, I went into my agency to rehearse it. It was my first time attempting this; I’d been up late working; I was exhausted; we had a lot of material and very little time to perfect it. When I finished my presentation and got a blustery response, something horrible happened in front of five men in suits: I cried.

It was a disaster. With those tears, I knew I’d personally let down Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Cleopatra, Grandma Moses, Sojourner Truth, Betty Friedan, and everyone in Josie and the Pussycats. Now that five men had seen me lose it, there would never be a female president.

Humiliated, using my iPhone as a tissue (and sadly there is no app for that), I remembered something that happened when I was 19.

I was in a college comedy improv group, and we’d spend winter breaks going on tour. The 10 of us rented a van and headed to high schools, churches, rotary clubs—anywhere we could get a few hundred dollars to put on a show.

The men outnumbered the women by more than two to one, and wherever we managed to find housing, fights broke out. Not necessarily real fights. I mean, there wasn’t always a reason why people were punching each other in the head other than to film it.

One time, we slept in a school’s administration building, and late in the night, a drunk senior slammed a freshman, Austin, into the corner of a file cabinet. Austin was more upset than hurt, so I took him outside into the hall where we sat and talked. After a few minutes, Austin told me “You’re the most human of all of them.”

And I thought, “Fuck. Does that mean I’m not funny?”

Somehow, I’d been convinced that humor didn’t come from people with humanity.