SARAH Silverman’s all wet across the pond.
Just as Silverman was riding high with a new series and pistol-hot Web video, the London newspapers yesterday slammed Silverman’s British debut.
“She blew it,” one critic wrote succinctly.
Her performance at London’s Hammersmith Apollo Theater Sunday night was apparently memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Silverman took the stage an hour late, performed old material, was heckled mercilessly (“You’re overhyped, Sarah!”) and abruptly exited after just 50 minutes, according to several reports.
She then re-appeared on stage, wearing slippers.
“With no other material prepared, she resorted to a Q&A with the audience, which left many cringing,” the media blogger for The Guardian wrote on the paper’s Web site.
The Daily Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish wrote that Silverman’s Q&A was “excruciatingly embarrassing” in a review headlined, “Death Strikes Suddenly.”
The nasty reception was a shock because Silverman’s arrival there was well-publicized and much talked about.
She’s in the UK mainly to promote the start of “The Sarah Silverman Program” on Comedy Central in the UK in April.
Tickets for her stand-up show were going for $100 a seat.
Silverman’s evening at the Hammersmith began inauspiciously when her opening act, Steve Agee, called in sick. His last-minute replacements were two guys who were booed off the stage after five minutes.
“The American comic had performed for just 50 minutes. No crime at a smaller, cheaper London venue such as the Soho Theatre,” opined the London Times’ Dominic Maxwell.
“But at this 3,500-seater, where it takes almost that long to queue for the bar . . . it was larceny.”
“As she stalked the stage, appearing to resent her crowd for wanting more, it was the [worst] end to a comedy show I’ve ever seen,” he wrote. “It was the usual petulance but without the usual inverted commas.
“She blew it.”