After a short stint as writer and performer for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1990s, comedian Sarah Silverman rose to fame with appearances on “Seinfeld,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and other TV shows. She also had roles in films including “There’s Something About Mary” and “School of Rock.”
Her debut concert film in 2005, “Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic,” showcased her early stand-up persona, which she now describes as “an arrogant, ignorant person.” She satirized bigotry by portraying a privileged woman who was unaware of her own short-sightedness. Silverman’s approach changed over time while she continued to mine deathly serious topics like the Holocaust for unexpected laughs.
After winning an Emmy award for a profane comedy song she performed on the TV show of her then-boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel, Silverman helmed her own TV series “The Sarah Silverman Program” and “I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman.” She adapted her memoir “The Bedwetter” into a musical that played off-Broadway in 2022 and now hosts an eponymous podcast on which she responds to listener calls.
Silverman debuts her new stand-up show, “Postmortem,” in a Thursday performance at the Stifel Theatre. It’s inspired by the recent death of her parents.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Silverman about how her approach has changed since the days of “Jesus Is Magic,” and the tricky alchemy of converting insights gained through talk therapy into laughs.
Jeremy D. Goodwin: What should we expect from “Postmortem”?
Sarah Silverman: It'll be at its most raw in St Louis. I mean, I promise it’s a good show I've worked hard on. But that's going to be the first night of discovery, figuring it out.
Goodwin: I guess we can infer it's not a bright and breezy night of observational comedy? Airline peanuts and such?
Silverman: I promise it will be fun and ridiculous and inappropriate, but it's about death — the one guaranteed thing we have.
Goodwin: You lost your parents within nine days of each other last year. How do you Rumpelstiltskin that into comedy?
Silverman: I think the one consistent thing with me is I've always kind of tackled the darkest reaches of humanity. This kind of started with speaking at my dad's funeral and eulogizing him and realizing there was a lot of funny stuff in it.
I've always felt that all comics become funny and develop their sense of humor as a means of surviving childhood. I would say 100% of comics become funny that way. So it's been a survival skill for us since we were kids, and so it is very natural to me that processing death — especially big ones like this, they were like my best friends — it feels very natural to process it through stand-up.
Goodwin: Even in 2024, one way to spot a comedian who comes from the Jewish culture is lots of references to the Holocaust and Hitler. In your Max special “Someone You Love” last year, we get about three minutes in before you're deep into a Holocaust bit.
Silverman: I mean, the girl can't help it.
Goodwin: It's an old observation to say that we Jews use humor as a coping mechanism to deal with trauma. Is that what you do?
Silverman: Definitely. And it really helps me. I think the two things that have helped me grow as a person are therapy and stand-up. I think a lot of comedians have really feared getting well because they feel like their comedy comes from not figuring out their s—-. For me, I disagree. I'd rather be happy because I think we live just one time on this rock in outer space, and it's crazy not to figure out your joy. But to be able to utilize it and use it in poignant, ridiculous and silly ways really works for me.
Goodwin: As I understand it, you were born into a household that was culturally Jewish but didn't really have a lot of religious content. Can you say anything about your relationship to Judaism as a comedian and how that has evolved?
Silverman: For me, being Jewish was really being the other, because I grew up in New Hampshire, and people didn't know Jews. I pretty much only knew I was Jewish growing up in New Hampshire because I had this innate understanding that when I went to a friend's house, I had to ingratiate myself to their parents. Looking back, I see how a lot of my comedy was being affable, showing my friends’ parents that I'm not anything to be afraid of.
My friend's parents would always say, “Are you from New York?” And I'd be like, “What? I'm from here! What's New York?” I understand now that they were young parents who had only ever lived in New Hampshire, and they understood Jews as living in New York because they know of them from movies and television, and that's what's shown.
Goodwin: An observation about your stand-up persona is that you're someone who's talking in intimate detail about your life, but as an unreliable narrator.
Silverman: Yeah, sure.
Goodwin: So much of your humor turns on that moment when the audience realizes, wait, we know more about this than she does. We understand something that she's missing. Does that resonate with how you think about what you're doing up there?
Silverman: Yeah. I mean, certainly in my early years of comedy, it was very much the opposite of my true feelings or opinions, and that would come through. The audience receives it in a way that it's meant. It's like Jeff Ross, the roastmaster general, always says: I only roast the ones I love. And that's truly the only way those harder jokes work. The audience has to know the meaning underneath the base meaning.
This is such a not-funny interview, I'm sorry. I like breaking down comedy, but …
Goodwin: You're on public radio, Sarah. This is how we do it.
Silverman:. Right. You know, the sound of a comic's voice and hearing it come from them is really key, especially with tricky material.
Goodwin: I think that dynamic of the layers of irony that are involved was much more in the forefront, as you mentioned, in your earlier work. I watched “Jesus Is Magic” last night to brush up.
Silverman: Oh, my God, I can't imagine.
Goodwin: It occurred to me that you weren't inviting people in to laugh at someone else. You were kind of inviting people in to disapprove of you.
Silverman: I think early on there was more character in it, and certainly it was purposefully racist and all the “ist”s, because the character was an ignorant, arrogant person. And I felt like the truth would come through that. And at the time, it worked. I can't imagine the level of ways in which that special does not hold up now. I think it would be hard to find any clip that works.
It's very hardcore, and it does not hold up in today's world. But that's also what art is, you know? You watch it in 2005, and it's a very different show than when you watch it in 2024. Because you've changed. Because the world has changed around us. I'm absolutely not proud of a lot of things in it, looking back at it today, but I accept that that's what it is to be an artist who’s been around a long time. Without the leeway of changing and growing, we just are defined by our singular moments.
Goodwin: One of the cultural shifts that occurred over the course of your career is I think it’s broadly understood that just as I can’t punch someone in the face and say — “Haha, wouldn’t that have been crazy if I meant that?” — a white person cannot deliver a racist joke as an ironically neutral demonstration of why racism is bad and foolish.
Silverman: Completely. The world was bigger, and I was way more ignorant. It's funny, because the character was this ignorant character that I could point to and go, “She doesn't understand, and she says all these horrible things but it's OK because it's a character and really I'm super liberal, blah, blah, blah.” And then the irony was that the real me behind that was ignorant.
But I have to accept that, because that's me and in order to grow, you have to accept that you can grow and change and be different than you were and not define yourself by your most ignorant moments.
