There's an art to turning life's worst days into laughter. In Sarah Silverman's latest comedy special, she turns an unimaginable blow—the deaths of her father and stepmother in 2023, just days apart—into witty one-liners, and her heartbreak into jokes.
"I worry that people think it's a soft thing, but it's actually the opposite, because it's the hardest thing," says Silverman, looking comfortable in a gray sweater and a bubblegum-pink beanie over her raven-colored hair. "It's something that terrifies us all, something none of us can avoid."
Director: Sarah Silverman
Writer: Sarah Silverman
Star: Sarah Silverman
Silverman's father, Donald "Schleppy" Silverman, and her stepmother, Janice, passed away in May 2023. Her father, whom she has described as her best friend, suffered kidney failure just nine days after Janice ended her fight against Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Sarah Silverman dedicates time in the 63-minute "PostMortem" (now available on Netflix) to each of her parents, including her mother, Beth Ann O'Hara, a woman of extreme punctuality and honesty, who passed away in 2015.
From the stage of New York's Beacon Theatre, Silverman recalls her father's time as owner of Crazy Sophie's Factory Outlet, his glowing Yelp review of his dentist, and the days leading up to his death. Silverman shares stories of Janice, "the sweetest woman you could ever meet," and her parents' very different reactions to Janice's diagnosis.
Janice's reaction is "so typical Janice," Silverman, 54, says in "PostMortem." "She just says, 'Well, I'll do everything you tell me. I'll do everything you tell me, and I'll fight it.'" Meanwhile, Silverman's father had "the craziest" response. "You just hear him say, 'I'm alone!'" Silverman says. "And then he says, 'I'm a widower!'"
"As horrible as those last few weeks were, it was really cathartic to spend almost a year on the road talking about it," Silverman tells USA TODAY. The PostMortem tour began on September 19 in St. Louis and ended in London on April 28. Donald and Janice's deaths coincided with the premiere of her HBO special "Someone You Love" in May 2023, after which Silverman needed material for a new hour-long comedy show. So she pulled out the eulogy she gave at her father's funeral.
“When I first started doing stand-up comedy, this was all I could think about,” she says. “I would arrive at Largo (a club in Los Angeles) after emptying my parents' apartment with my sisters and just let it all out.”
Near the start of the tour, it felt “a chore to get up on stage and figure it out,” she says. She had to fine-tune the details that weren't working. “And once I got it right, I was so excited to tell people about my parents every night.”
Silverman and her father grew closer as she grew older. “He was always very funny, but he scared me a lot as a kid,” she says, recalling his “uncontrolled screaming… He had a lot of anger issues,” but over the years he became “a very calm, joyful, and grateful man.”
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