Emerald at the Emmys: Sarah Silverman Pulls Out Her Vape Pen and Takes Home a Statue for Writing

UPDATE 9/19: When Sharon Osbourne asked her to show her purse contents to 2019 Emmy watchers,  Silverman said, "Funny, I got in trouble a few years ago; now it's legal" as she showed she had two joints taped to the top (to keep them from getting smushed) plus a vape ("for emergiencies"). "I know people always think of me as a stoner, but I really just take a puff," Silverman said. "What's wrong with that, people?" a supportive Osbourne said, to which Sarah replied, "Absolutely nothing." 

Silverman lost in her Emmy category (for the now-cancelled Hulu series "I Love America") to the mostly mediocre SNL, but got the biggest laugh of the night by pretending to be asleep when the winner was called, and made news for calling out the Emmys and our culture for silencing comedians.

UPDATE 10/15: Silverman is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Five Tokin Women were up for Emmys, presented at an awards ceremony tonight. But it's Sarah Silverman who is now trending, after she won an Emmy for writing her Variety Special We Are Miracles - just after she showed off her vape pen on the red carpet, calling it "liquid marijuana." Silverman stood out in her long, green dress on a night when almost every actress wore red.

Silverman said afterwards she didn't "have a puff-a-roony" until after the event. But kicking off her shoes and speaking about molecules hurtling through space for her speech seemed the stoniest since Whoopi Goldberg accepter her Oscar. Fox News noticed what a stony night it was and Kate Rogers said Sarah seems to be aging in reverse (meaning looking younger all the time). "The magical properties of weed!" commented Gabrielle Karol. "Is high the new drunk?" asked host Diana Falzone. Now that 23 states have some kind of legalized pot, it seems so, replied Chris Kensler.


Former SNLer Amy Poehler was up for Outstanding Lead Actress in Parks and Recreation and told the best joke of the night: introducing Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey she said, "Please welcome two men who are menu items at marijuana dispensaries."

Jane Fonda, who recently won an AFI lifetime achievement award, was nominated as Outstanding Guest Actress for The Newsroom; Fonda's nomination reel contained a scene in which her character is stoned.

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley also garnered two nominations, for Whoopi as Outstanding Narrator, and for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Special. Whoopi recently waxed rhapsodic about her cannabis vape pen in a Denver Post article. (She lost the narration prize to Jeremy Irons and the doc lost to PBS's JFK.)

COSMOS, co-produced by NORML board member Ann Druyan (pictured), was up for ten awards and won three. Druyan is the widow of Very Important Pothead Carl Sagan.

VIPs in the Male Category who were nominated include Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as actors in True Detective and Anthony Bordain for hosting The Taste. Bourdain's Parts Unknown won for Outstanding Informational Series and was up for five more awards. The Colbert Report received five nominations, including outstanding Variety Series, vying with Real Time with Bill Maher for that award (and winning). Seth MacFarlane was nominated for Outstanding Character Voiceover Performance for Family Guy; he was also a producer on COSMOS.

Also a winner is Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis and Barack Obama for Outstanding Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Program.

Who says stoners don't contribute to our culture?

Allison Janney beat out Jane Fonda as Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for "Masters of Sex" and also took home an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress for "Mom." A little while back, someone wrote in that her mom smoked pot with Allison back in college.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus beat out Amy Poehler for best actress in a comedy series. See her searching for a bag of weed on her old Christine series.

Kathy Bates played a marijuana smoker in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law," but had to play a witch in "American Horror Story: Coven" to win an Emmy. Another "Coven" winner was Jessica Lange, whose character apparently snorts coke. Bates, who also played Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film, wore an outfit (right) that almost looked like it was decorated with big silver pot leaves. 

While reigning as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, Adam Levine gave a fistpump in support of marijuana legalization on the program.

An Old Fashioned Ladies' Pot Party in "9 to 5"

I just re-viewed 9 to 5 (1980), the classic film with Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, and had to write about it.

First, I was struck by the scene with Tomlin as Violet with her teenage son, when she's stressing about getting a promotion at her job from her sexist boss. It goes like this:

"Mom, you've got to relax. I'm gonna roll you a joint."

"Josh, you know how I feel about that. Besides your grandmother would pitch a fit if she even hears you mention the word marijuana." 

"She doesn't understand moderation. You're the one who keeps saying harm springs from excess. I'm talking about one joint." 

Wise messages about moderation coming from the younger generation, as taught (properly) by an elder.

Tomlin's character takes the joint, and proffers it to her colleagues played by Fonda and Parton, telling them, "We could have ourselves an old fashioned ladies' pot party." Fonda plays an innocent, recent divorcée who pronounces it "really good pot" after the gigglefest that follows.

It's a scene that harkens back to Easy Rider (1969) in which her brother Peter turns on the innocent Jack Nicholson. It took women a little longer to get there, but we did. The ladies bond over the experience, and soon concoct a wild way to bring justice and equality to their workplace. In a later scene, Fonda announces to her ex-husband that she smokes marijuana as part of her awakening. As an extra treat, VIP Sterling Hayden is featured as the company CEO who sweeps in to help give the ladies' dastardly boss (Dabney Coleman) what he deserves.

The film was viewed on Valentines Day 1981 by Ronald and Nancy "Just Say No" Reagan, after Ronnie wrote in his diary, "Funny—but one scene made me mad. A truly funny scene if the 3 gals had played getting drunk but no they had to get stoned on pot. It was an endorsement of Pot smoking for any young person who sees the picture." I guess he missed the moderation discussion with Violet and her son. And, the characters getting drunk would have been just fine with him.

Decades later, the movie was just about the only example a recent New York Magazine article could find of women smoking pot together on film, in a world where only "every once in a while you’ll get a Meet the Fockers–style mockable hippie-mom type."

9-5 was written and directed by Colin Higgins, who also wrote Harold and Maude (1971), in which an 80-year-old woman turns a young man onto pot (and life).

UPDATE: Tomlin sports a "Violet" tattoo in the movie "Grandma" (2015), where she plays a pot-smoking woman with much more punch that her TV character on "Grace & Frankie." Fonda shines as a hippie activist/pot peddler (also named Grace) who wisely and carefully instructs her grandkids on the use of a hookah in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" (2011).  

In 2023, the two spoke with Stephen Colbert about doing peyote together, as they did on the first episode of "Grace & Frankie." The two were promoting their film "Moving On," written and directed by Paul Weitz, who worked with Tomlin on "Grandma." Now in their 80s, the pair also co-starred last year in "80 for Brady" with Rita Moreno and Sally Field. 

It's nice to see Tomlin, at 85, starring in feature films; when she made "Grandma" she hadn't starred in a movie since she made "Big Business" in 1988 with Bette Midler, except for the 1991 film version of her one-woman play, "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe."  It seems the public is finally ready for Lily's shamanhood (it's about time). 

Why Nancy Reagan Was The True Traitor to America (Not Jane Fonda)

Fonda as Reagan. (We like her look better as a hippie.)

Jane Fonda is playing Nancy Reagan in a new movie, "The Butler" and the right [sic] wing is predictably apoplectic about "Hanoi Jane" playing the wife of their sainted spokesmodel. One theater in Kentucky even refused to show the movie in protest.

But who is the real American traitor?

When Ronald Wilson Reagan* beat Jimmy Carter for president in 1979, the Iranian hostages that ruined Carter's re-election chances were released within 24 hours. Only later did we find out it was because Reagan had made a secret deal to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for their release on his watch. After his election, Reagan subverted Congress by exchanging arms for cocaine in Nicaragua, and dumping it in Los Angeles's American-American neighborhoods, leading to our crack epidemic.

And all the while Nancy Reagan was the face of the Just Say No to drugs campaign in the US. "So that while Nancy Reagan was saying 'Just Say No,' the CIA was saying 'Just Fly Low,'" joked Paul Krassner.

Adding to the hypocrisy, according to Kitty Kelley's book Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the Reagans smoked a joint proffered by Nancy’s chum Albert Bloomingdale at a dinner party with Jack Benny and George Burns around 1968. (Bloomingdale reportedly got the joint from a hooker; he was later accused by his longtime mistress Vicki Morgan of riding her piggyback and whipping her.)

Kelley wrote that Nancy siphoned off $3.8 million from her antidrug charities into her own foundation, and an unnamed senior White House staffer speculates in the book that she was on amphetamines to curb her appetite because she was so energetic. But apparently when Kelley's book came out, it was the charge of smoking marijuana that the Reagans found most insulting, because that was the incident they answered publicly.

In 2008 Nancy endorsed John McCain for president. Now that the tide is turning, and polls are showing a majority of Americans are for marijuana legalization, McCain has said, “Maybe we should legalize.”

Will Nancy follow? She’s been a champion for Alzheimer's awareness and in 2009 she praised President Obama for reversing the ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research. There's still time for her to figure out, as the song says, "Them Hippies Was Right."

*Each of those names has six letters

Also see: The Disastrous Legacy of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" Campaign. 

Jane Fonda: What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Misunderstanding?

Jane Fonda as Grace in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

It's the role of a lifetime for Jane Fonda. No, not Nancy Reagan. It's the hippie grandmother Grace in 2011's Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, now being shown on The Movie Channel.

Fonda plays the mother of uptight attorney Diane, played by Catherine Keener. Diane brings her two teenage children to her mother's house after their father demands a divorce, and it turns out to be a healing journey, as well as a cultural clash.

Grace, whose home reeks of pot, deals a little on the side and introduces her grandkids (Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff) to the wonders of the weed. It's done intelligently, with Grace resorting to it before losing them to an evening of them closing down (as so many teens do). Afterwards, she gives them sage advice: stay away from the brown stuff (heroin) and nothing up the nose (cocaine).

It's the first Fonda has toked on film since 9 to 5, where she plays an innocent who finds her inner strength with the aid of weed and some gal pals. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding is part Harold and Maude, part Pineapple Express and although some would say it's a bit contrived or heavy-handed, it's well worth seeing for Fonda's performance.

Jane was observed smoking some weed at a recent Oscar party; in 1969 asked Rex Reed, "You don't mind if I turn on, do you?" before he interviewed her the year she won a well-deserved Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

She's still vilified as "Hanoi Jane" even though she spent the war advocating for veterans. Fonda's thoughtful film about the Vietnam War, Coming Home, was trounced at the Oscars in favor of the controversial The Deer Hunter. Recent controversy is about Jane playing Nancy Reagan in a forthcoming film, and there's a note about Reagan in Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding.

The child of a famously stoic movie icon father and a beautiful mother who killed herself when Jane was 12, she played out her relationship with her father onscreen in On Golden Pond while getting her body bikini ready. She was also terrific as Lillian Hellman in Julia and in her current turn as a network executive on TV's The Newsroom.

She's still getting roles at the age of 75, and we're looking forward to more insight and enlightenment from Lady Jane.

UPDATE 8/14 - Fonda was honored with an AFI Life Achievement Award at a splendid ceremony with tributes from Lily Tomlin, Michael Douglas, Meryl Streep, Ron Kovic, Jeff Daniels, Peter Fonda, Troy Garity (her son with Tom Hayden, pictured) and many more. Fonda commented that it was good to see the award go to a woman; earlier winners were Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwick, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, and Shirley MacLaine.

UPDATE 12/14: Fonda, in one of her last appearances on HBO's The Newsroom, utters the line, "I sold my clothes, dealt a little pot.....Just kidding, I didn't sell my clothes," when her character Leona is trying to come up with funds to buy back her network. The role was doubtlessly informed by her marriage to CNN's Ted Turner. Recently we uncovered an exchange between Fonda and Bill Maher where Bill tries to get her to out Turner as "a big pothead" and Fonda gets an admission from Bill instead.

12/19: Fonda has been named Tokin' Woman of the Year for 2019. 

Of Shamans and Charlize: Pot at the Oscars

Once more the Oscar ceremonies seemed to be dominated by weed lovers, starting with host Seth MacFarlane. Noted for his "Family Guy" series with segments like "Bag o' Weed," MacFarlane did better with his musical numbers than he did with his jokes.

Charlize Theron shone in a dance number at the show's opening, nearly rescuing MacFarlane—as she did a security guard who had a seizure on the red carpet. Theron was caught on camera smoking pot out of an apple in 2002. [Update 2018: Theron now admits she was "a wake-and-baker for most of my life."]

Jane Fonda, who was spotted last year smoking pot at a post-Oscar party, wowed everyone at the age of 75 in her sleek Versace gown. She co-presented with Michael Douglas, who urged the U.S. to consider legalizing the use of marijuana in 2009.

Another bright spot was the surprise appearance of Barbra Streisand, singing "The Way We Were" in a tribute to the late Marvin Hamlich. According to David Crosby's book Stand and Be Counted, her role in that movie was dependent on her appearing at a 1972 McGovern rally planned by Warren Beatty, at which she appeared to take a toke from a joint onstage.

Anne Hathaway, who smoked pot onscreen in "Havoc" (2005), took home a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress trophy for Les Miserables.  As is now de rigueur, she thanked everyone including her publicist, but failed to recognize the story's author Victor Hugo, a member of Le Club des Hashishins.

Daniel Day Lewis did give a nod to Abraham Lincoln, who inspired his Oscar-winning performance. Depicted in that movie were Lincoln's secretary John Hay, who took cannabis while a student at Brown and went on to become Secretary of State; and Mary Todd Lincoln, the daughter of hemp farmers in Kentucky. (Reports remain unconfirmed that Abraham Lincoln smoked a hemp pipe, although he did play a harmonica.)

Ang Lee, who won Best Director for "The Life of Pi," said he'd tried marijuana while being interviewed in Cannes for his movie "Taking Woodstock" in 2009. Quentin Tarantino, who took Best Original Screenplay for "Django Unchained," recently compared the drug war to slavery. He's pictured on the Craig Ferguson show wearing a Lifted Research Group T-shirt with pot leaves. (See Lifted's Ladies T: Don't Do Drugs, Smoke Weed.)

Presenting the Best Picture prize of the night was the incomparable Jack Nicholson, who says he still smokes weed, and Michelle Obama, who's married to a former enthusiast. It went to "Argo," co-produced and directed by Ben Affleck, who graduated from stoner movies like "Dazed and Confused" and "Chasing Amy." George Clooney, also a producer, has said he liked acid and mushrooms in college.

"Every day through engagement in the arts, children learn to dream big," said our First Lady. "If a film crew is a tribe, the cinematographer is the shaman," said Robert Downey Jr. It seems like there are a whole lot of shamans in Hollywood, and we're all the tribe.

The entire ceremony is now online.

Who's Got the Mary -- Jane?

On Jay Leno's show (March 15), "Glee" star Jane Lynch chatted about the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party at the Sunset Towers, where everyone looked good but were boring to talk to. "I ended up in a corner somewhere, and somebody lit up a marijuana cigarette," Lynch said. After the partiers sat at her table, "and all of a sudden everyone's saying, 'Jane's got pot!"

"I don't smoke I don't drink and I'm writing a book about how I don't do those things," Lynch explained, while chuckling about the incident with a non-shocked Jay. "It was being smoked around me, and I stopped breathing, I didn't inhale."

Turns out, it may have been a different Jane who did the inhaling.

Gatecrasher at the New York Daily News reports of the party:

"During one trip to a bar in the back of the tent, we recognized the familiar aroma of marijuana, and then caught sight of 'Easy Rider' star Peter Fonda standing in the corner with his sister’s boyfriend, music producer Richard Perry. Inches away, Jane Fonda (seated next to 'Glee' star Jane Lynch) used one hand to shield her mouth while puffing what looked like a handmade cigarette.

"At a nearby bar, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short stood chatting. O’Hara reportedly grinned and asked, 'Do you smell the weed? We’re blaming it on Peter Fonda'.”

Peter Fonda, of course, produced and starred in Easy Rider, in which Jack Nicholson played an innocent trying pot for the first time. Jane played a similar role in 9 to 5, as a divorced woman empowering herself in more ways than one.

"You don't mind if I turn on, do you?" Fonda (pictured) asked Rex Reed before puffing some of "the real thing" on New Years Eve, 1969, the day she found out she won a NY Film Critics Award for her performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? "Hey, it's no secret that I've smoked pot," Fonda wrote in her 2005 autobiography My Life So Far. 

Nicholson criticized America's War on Drugs in a recent interview with a British newspaper, and said he still smokes pot. "I don't tend to say this publicly, but we can see it's a curative thing," Nicholson told the UK's Daily Mail.