SARAH SILVERMAN: LIFE AFTER DEATH

How the comedian has survived grief, loss, and controversy

- By STEPHEN RODRICK • Photographs by LAUREN DUKOFF

Sarah 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.”