S arah Silverman has a shy side. No, really. For years, she avoided doing a podcast because she didn’t want to ask her friends to be on another comedy show. Then, during the pandemic, ­Silverman came up with a solution. She made her fans the guests. Now, listeners call in to The Sarah ­Silverman Podcast and leave voicemails for “your pal Sarah,” and then the NYU dropout provides counsel. 

Today, she sits in a West Hollywood studio in jeans, Converse, and a vaguely military-­flight-jacket thingy on top. Her jet-black hair is piled up high, and her face is framed by oversize reading glasses. Now 54, she exudes a sexy homewrecker of Shaker Heights vibe.

Her advice to callers can be serious — a month ago, she sympathized with a transgender woman who thought she had to leave the country with Trump back in office — and graphic (Silverman answered a question on menopausal hormone replacement by gleefully detailing how she lets her partner insert hormone suppositories into her vagina). The calls can also be stupid, like when a man who is 49 but says he looks 35 complains that he can’t get respect for the road he’s traveled. Silverman has no patience with him.

“Well, you sound old, and your questions are boring. Is that something?”

Her producer cues up another voicemail.

“Hi, Sarah, Amanda Knox here. Yes, that one. My question has to do specifically with tragedies — or, I guess, comedy around tragedies. I went through a whole tragic experience myself, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, all of that, and one of the ways that I have coped was to make jokes about it.… But when I have made jokes, some people have laughed, and some people have called me a psychopath for daring to make any kind of comedy out of the tragedy I went through. And I guess my question is, ‘Is someone like me allowed to be funny?’ Thank you.”

Silverman pauses to confer with her podcast staff. Is this the Amanda Knox of tabloid fame, wrongly convicted of murdering her roommate in Italy in 2007? They confirm that the voice matches up. They resume taping.

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“Yeah, comedy is the relief valve,” says Silverman. “On one hand, there is a time and a place for it. But on the other hand, the worst and most inappropriate place for it is kind of the place for it, too.”

Silverman smiles for a second, possibly remembering her own tragedy-plus-time childhood featuring her father’s philandering, her bed-wetting, and a brother who died before she was born. Those experiences had led Silverman to describe her younger self as “cunty and judgmental,” but she has matured into something more substantial that has her producing the best comedy of her career. She gives Knox permission to do the same.

“You kind of called the devil on your shoulder for advice on it,” says Silverman. “You’ve been through a lot, and comedy is kind of like the flower that comes up through the pavement. It emerges in the darkest spaces. It’s a crack of light, but also highly subjective, so something that is a relief for one person maybe is triggering for another. You can’t please everyone.” Silverman shrugs.

“I hope that helps. I’m going to assume it probably did not.”

She is probably wrong.

“Comedy is kind of like the flower that comes up through the pavement.”

GETTING OLD SUCKS. You ache in the places where you used to play, as Leonard Cohen said. Your kid’s buddy asks him why his “grandfather” is walking him to school. Also, the people you love die.

Sarah Silverman knows this better than most. It’s been more than 30 years since she became part of the American cultural landscape with NSFW jokes like, “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” She isn’t that girl anymore, although she can still describe her boyfriend giving her a facial that resembles Hitler’s mustache. In May 2023, she lost her father and best friend, Donald, and her stepmother, Janice, nine days apart. Her new Netflix stand-up special, PostMortem (premiering May 20), contains some filth but is mainly a valentine to loved ones past.

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On an overcast afternoon, clad in a baseball cap and hoodie, Silverman gives me a tour of the photos on the wall of her Los Angeles living room as her two rescue dogs, Mary and Sibby, linger nearby. Her mom, Beth, smiles down from a frame, wearing her favorite overalls. Beth died in 2015, but Silverman still has her overalls. There’s one of Silverman with her boyfriend, Rory Albanese, a producer for Jimmy Kimmel (himself an ex and longtime friend), and other snapshots featuring various combinations of her three sisters and their children, scattered between L.A., Australia, and Israel. She narrates her personal history in the small voice that has told 1,001 jokes about fucking.

“OK, that’s me and Rory. This is my sister Laura and my niece Aliza.” She pauses by a photo of herself wearing a mustache, a Nazi uniform, and a smirk on her face. “That’s me as Hitler backstage on Conan.” She moves on. “OK, this is my best friend, Tall John, at poker. He’s 6’10” and always wears this shirt of mine that he bought on Etsy when we play poker.”

There’s one man who appears in more photos than others, and that is her father, Donald “Schleppy” Silverman. In one, Donald wears a Pride shirt and a goofy grin outside of the Airport Diner in Manchester, New ­Hampshire. Silverman’s voice trails off as she looks at her dad.

“He was my best friend, my buddy.” She makes an edit. “Well, he wasn’t my best friend until I was older. He was not physically abusive, but he had uncontrollable rage.”

Silverman then turns her frown upside down. “He shed that. Age, enlightenment, and Zoloft were an excellent combination for him.”

SILVERMAN TELLS TWO STORIES about her dad, both of which are true. One is happy. The other features unfathomable darkness and is depicted comically in Silverman’s memoir, Bedwetter, and the still-developing Bedwetter: The Musical, with music by the late Adam Schlesinger. 

The happy tale is told in PostMortem, a joyous remembrance of Schleppy as a wisecracking man who ran Crazy Sophie’s Factory Outlet in Bedford, New Hampshire, where the Silvermans were the only Jewish family. That’s the Donald who was madly in love with his second wife, Janice. The Donald who hams it up in sporadic appearances on Sarah’s comedy specials and series. The Donald who taught Sarah her first swear words at three. It’s the Donald who was charming enough to persuade his ex-wife, Beth, to regularly cut his toenails and was so afraid of pain that he left the cardiogram stickers on his belly until they fell off naturally rather than experience the mild agony of pulling them off his hairy stomach.

“Everyone says their dad is unique, the best,” says Albanese, who started dating Silverman after they became online friends playing Call of Duty during the pandemic. “But Donald really was unique.”

Albanese tells me a story about Donald getting a tattoo with the name of his wife on his right butt cheek when he was 80. True to form, Donald howled at the pain.

“I was telling my parents the story, and Donald was there,” says Albanese. “And he says, ‘You want to see it?’ And he stands up and just pulls out his right ass, right in the restaurant. That’s Donald.”

But Schleppy traveled a long, tortured road before becoming a mensch. Much of it is detailed in Bedwetter.

“My dad had a heartbreaking childhood,” Silverman tells me. “His dad beat the shit out of him every day, just mercilessly. He had a younger brother who wasn’t touched. His father made the kids call him Mr. Silverman.”

Donald was sent away to Christian school, where he was beaten up repeatedly, simply for being the sole Jew. His only solace was Jewish summer camp, where he made friends who he stayed in touch with his entire life.

After high school, Donald found a kindred spirit in Beth Ann, Sarah’s mom, who was also regularly beaten as a child. The couple moved to Bedford and started a family that eventually begat four daughters and a son.

The union wasn’t a happy one. Donald was repeatedly unfaithful and belittled his wife’s artistic side. (She was a painter, and in PostMortem, Silverman recounts how her mom would do dramatic readings of movie times for a local cinema.) 

“She was more of a free spirit than my dad, who wanted to be a writer but instead took over his father’s store,” says Silverman. “Once they were married and she became a part of him ego-wise, he pounded that out of her and made fun of her. He humiliated her and felt she was lazy because she was in bed a lot. That was before people knew what depression was.”

There was more sorrow. Five years before Sarah was born, her mom won a cruise on a game show, and the couple left their infant son, Jeffrey, home with Donald’s parents. The baby died when part of his crib collapsed on him. Jeffrey was never spoken of. One day, her grandmother was driving a five-year-old Sarah and her three older sisters to breakfast and told them to buckle up their seat belts.  

“Yeah, we don’t want to wind up like Jeffrey,” said Sarah.

The car went quiet, and her grandmother began to weep. Sarah rarely brought up her brother again. Silverman suffered with bed-wetting until she was 15, stressing about sleepovers and packing diapers for the summers when her dad forced her to go to camp.

“He thought since he had such great memories of it, I’d have the same,” says Silverman. “But I just dreaded it.”

“My dad had a heartbreaking childhood. His dad beat the shit out of him every day, mercilessly.”

Her father eventually took her to a psychiatrist who prescribed her Xanax. Soon, she was taking 16 tablets a day. Impossibly, it got worse. The doctor hanged himself one day while Sarah was waiting for an appointment to begin. Then, Donald and Beth split up. Sarah’s sisters went to live with him while she stayed with their mom.

“They had an ugly divorce where my dad spread horrible rumors that she was crazy and I wasn’t safe in the house,” remembers Silverman. “And it wasn’t true.”

Donald turned the corner when he met his second wife shortly after his divorce. Gradually, tensions eased between her parents, and they both remarried. “Once they were separate entities and she wasn’t a part of his own self-loathing and he dealt with his shit, he could see her as this woman he had wonderful kids with,” Silverman says.

As a kid, Sarah had been the family cutup and sang on a cable-access talent show. She went to NYU at 18 and immediately fell in love with stand-up, handing out flyers for a comedy club and working her way up from open mics to $20 gigs. Her dad eventually made her a deal: He would pay for her room and board for three years if she wanted to drop out of college and pursue comedy. 

Silverman had early success, becoming a Saturday Night Live writer at 22, but was fired after one season, at least partially because she playfully threw a pencil that stabbed Al Franken in the forehead. She wasn’t happy. “I caught rage from my dad, an uncontrollable rage,” says Silverman.  

Two things changed her life: Zoloft and Garry Shandling. After being fired from SNL, Silverman scored a part playing a misunderstood filthy comedy writer on The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling’s classic send-up of the talk-show game. He invited her along with some other friends to his Malibu home. Silverman was so new to L.A. that she thought Malibu was in Hawaii, not 30 minutes up the Pacific Coast Highway. Soon, she was joining Shandling and his friends in his regular pickup basketball games.

Shandling, a follower of Buddha and New Age advice guru Eckhart Tolle, shared wisdom with Silverman about suffering. “He was always searching, because he was tortured,” she says. “He really passed on that experience, hard lessons he learned in hard ways, that he just gave us on a silver platter. There was pain you had to experience, and there was some pain that could be avoided.”

MANY OF SHANDLING’S LESSONS centered around having empathy in both your own life and in your comedy. It took decades for that to sink in with Silverman. In her 2005 special, Jesus Is Magic, she is finishing a bit on undersize humans preferring to be called little people rather than midgets when she perhaps unwittingly puts her finger on American comedy’s predilection of punching down for laughs.

“I’ll tell you why we make fun of midgets,” she says in the special. “We’re not afraid of them. That’s what it boils down to, you know? I mean, I had a joke with the word n—-r in it that I thought was so edgy and hip.… I was at this one club doing my show, and I looked in the front row and the whole table is Black people or African American people … and I didn’t do it because I was afraid of them.” Silverman pauses. “And I ended up changing that joke to ch–ks, so, you live and you learn.”

Silverman’s riff was standard fare for much of her career. She has been pilloried for doing an episode of her first television show, The Sarah Silverman Program, in blackface, and protested by Asian American groups for her use of the aforementioned slur on Conan. She regrets all of that.

“I felt like the temperature of the world around me at the time was ‘We are all liberal so we can say the n-word,’” says Silverman. “‘We aren’t racist, so we can say this derogatory stuff.’ I was playing a character that was arrogant and ignorant, so I thought it was OK. Looking back, my intentions were always good, but they were fucking ignorant.”

Silverman devoted an episode to her blackface incident on her Hulu show, I Love You, America, in 2018, and also apologized for cruel jokes she’d made about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in earlier years.

“I don’t think of myself as being PC out of fear,” says Silverman. “Some people got mad at me for apologizing. I only did that because I was sorry. That’s a really great rule of thumb: Only apologize when you’re sorry.” Silverman’s face brightens. “Always apologize when you’re sorry.”

Silverman’s relationship with her friend Dave Chappelle is instructive. In 2019, she introduced Chappelle when he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Last November, she found herself in Ohio on election night and watched the returns in despair with him. “As the night went on, he was saying, ‘She’s still going to get it. There’s still a way,’” she says. “He was doing the desperate math in his head that we all did.”

“Looking back, my intentions were always good, but they were fucking ignorant.”

In between those two events, in 2022, Chappelle did an SNL monologue riffing on antisemitic social media posts by Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving. On her podcast, Silverman described her friend’s monologue as “hilarious and brilliant and winning and charming and wildly antisemitic.” 

Silverman eventually plays a clip from the monologue where Chappelle makes a fantastical leap, claiming that Jewish Americans holding West and Irving accountable for their racism were scapegoating Blacks: “This is where, you know, I draw a line,” Chappelle says. “I know the Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world, but, but, but, but you can’t blame them on Black Americans. You just can’t.”

Silverman came back at him.

“He kind of, like, Jimmy Stewart stutters at the end, to give it a little folksy truth-­telling charm,” said Silverman. “But fuck, the idea (that) calling out massively influential zillionaire superstars for posting lies and promoting hatred of Jews is ‘the Jews blaming their troubles on Black Americans’ is fucking insane. I can’t believe I have to say this.”

When we talk, Silverman isn’t interested in relitigating the issue, but it goes to a larger concern of hers that traces, in a way, back to her dad — how men channel confusion and depression into rage. She describes it in the context of the anger she sees many men direct toward the transgender community.

“Men have been raised to not be able to feel, not be able to express themselves,” says Silverman. “The only acceptable emotion for some reason is anger. So what happens? They feel shame and that immediately, like sugar getting converted to carbs, that gets converted into rage and outward blame. And that’s how they survive. When I see that anger directed at the trans community, at the nonspecific, nonbinary, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with themselves. It’s ego and the terror of ‘If that’s who they are, then who am I? Where do I fall?’”

SILVERMAN ISN’T IMMUNE to reacting emotionally to issues that cut to the bone. She wasn’t raised religious but is hyper-aware of her Jewishness and being seen as the other in polite society. In the Bedwetter musical, a 10-year-old Sarah is confronted by her gentile classmates, who taunt, “You’re short and dark and eww-y.” She replies: “I know what you mean! I’m totally Jew-y! I’m the type of kid that’s too Jew-y to ignore!”

That hard-to-ignore quality hasn’t always worked out well for her. When some critics expressed horror at Bradley Cooper’s utilization of a prosthetic nose in his Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, her phone rang off the hook with comment requests from reporters, many of whom completely missed that Silverman was in the movie playing Bernstein’s sister. 

She has confessed to feeling no emotional attachment to Israel, but with some of her family living there, the Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, left her devastated. A few days after the attack, Silverman reposted an Instagram post suggesting Israel had no obligation to provide food and water to Gaza. She immediately received a wave of backlash from friends and critics. She apologized but still seems shook and uncertain about how to deal with the conflict as a comedian.

Seeing the reactions to Oct. 7 left her “stunned,” she says. “The alienation of liberal Jews was astounding. Everyone’s afraid to say anything. I couldn’t even imagine doing stand-up. I was scared. And it was Chelsea Handler who was like, ‘Get your fucking ass up. Your job is to make people laugh. That’s your job.’ And I needed that. Boy, I needed it. And then she made me open for her at the Pantages (Theatre). And it was honestly a gift, because I realize that it’s important.”

BACK AT THE STUDIO, Silverman ends the show with her trademark goodbye line: “Dad, we’re winding down.” We then move to the lounge, and I ask a question I was too chicken to ask at her house. I tell her I’d written about my own family, never talking about my father after he was killed in a plane crash. I wonder if her parents had ever reached a point where they could talk about the death of her brother Jeffrey.

Silverman exhales.

“I’m going to tell you a big bomb.”

She begins by telling me that when she wrote her memoir, she was struck by the fact that while her parents had different versions of every issue of their marriage, they spoke the same words in describing how their son died. “The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid and he got suffocated. But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything,” says Silverman.

Then, in 2022, the year before he died, Donald Silverman came to see a production of Bedwetter in Manhattan. He watched it five nights in a row. The musical features a scene about little Sarah making her joke about Jeffrey’s death and no one laughing. Donald came backstage after the fifth show and told Sarah a different story about Jeffrey and his violent father. “My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him,’” remembers Silverman. “‘He shook him in a rage and killed him.’”

Silverman’s manager gasps from a nearby sofa. The room goes quiet for a moment.

“As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened,’” says Silverman. “His mother always stood by her husband. She watched him beat the shit out of her son. I couldn’t ask my mom, because she was dead.”

She sighs and then smiles.

“That was my dad,” says Silverman with a laugh. “We were playing poker once, and he just dropped in that one of the priests at his school fondled him. I was like ‘Dad!’” She gives me a “What are you gonna do?” look.

“He was always dropping bombs.”

And that’s when I realize Sarah Silverman is very much her father’s daughter.