Dark humour is a safety mechanism, a release valve for when the pressure of real life gets too much to handle. If we can laugh even in the worst of circumstances, even at the worst of things, then we know, on some level, everything will be okay. This is nothing new, but it’s rare for a comic to build an entire special around the idea. But that’s exactly the vibe of Sarah Silverman: PostMortem, a deeply personal meditation on loss that every now and again punctures the morbidity with a fart joke (or something worse.)
PostMortem is about the deaths of Silverman’s father and stepmother close together, but it isn’t too navel-gazing to be enjoyed by typical fans of the coarse controversialist, who has made a career saying the worst things possible so she didn’t have to wear her heart so openly on her sleeve. There are still jokes about Hitler, Jews, bodily fluids and functions, and the usual risqué stuff, but now they’re in service of a more introspective celebration of the people who taught Silverman how to swear – and, by that logic, were directly responsible for her success.
It’s nice when comedy does this, and nicer still when a long-time comedian goes off-brand to do it, because it captures that feeling of evolution that death creates in us all. Loss changes us; sometimes for the worse, sure, but always unavoidably, and grieving is about the person we’ve become, waving goodbye to the person we were, not just the person we’ve lost. Silverman’s openness about the final days of her parents’ lives, when she was living with them and caring for them and still finding accidental material in their last moments, is her discovering not only that she can live without them but that she can immortalize them on stage, in a way everyone can relate to.
Relatability is a nebulous concept at the best of times, but death is the one thing that unites us all, so there’s universal appeal in the anxiety of wondering who we are in the absence of the people who have raised us, and contemplating the murky ethics of what we do with the memories once they’re all we have left. For Silverman, that’s a trickier question, since she has made a career from monetizing her life experiences. But everything she shares about her beloved dad Donald, aka Schleppy, suggests he wouldn’t have minded being the butt of the joke.
In PostMortem, Sarah Silverman isn’t shy about pointing out her evolution, acknowledging that she’s no longer the comedian she once was, even though it’s obvious in the material anyway. And why not? It’s always a bit depressing when I see a long-time comic leaning against the same bits and personas that they adopted when they got famous (I’m looking at you, Gabriel Iglesias). If art reflects life, it should be challenging. Maybe not all of the time, granted, but Silverman has been doing this forever. Her latest special works because it’s atypical, because it isn’t easy and obvious, and in her usual wheelhouse. If some fans don’t care for it, so what? There are those who will, who will themselves have recently binge-watched a show with a dying relative – Netflix’s Beef, in this case – or laughed at a bleak gag made in the most challenging of moments. This hour is for those people. But it’s mainly for Silverman herself, who over the years has earned it.