Sarah Silverman isn’t afraid to be frank. She’s managed to build an impressive career out of comedy that addresses taboo and controversial subjects—homophobia, politics, religion, and racism, for example—yet winning fans over with her adorable, little-girl voice; her enormous, friendly smile; and her ability to be lovably earnest while at the same time flat-out, wickedly funny. In her new Postmortem tour, which makes its way to Reno on Oct. 26, Silverman unearths comedy from perhaps the most unlikely source of all: her parents’ death.
Not quite sold? She jokingly admits that she herself is unsure how to sell the show based on its subject matter. “Oh, it’s about your parents dying? Where can I buy tickets?” she joked.
Nonetheless, in our short conversation via Zoom, she shared poignant memories of her larger-than-life father, Donald Silverman, known affectionately by those closest to him as Schleppy, and from her stories it’s already obvious how the show works comedically. First, she explains, her father and stepmother, Janice, died nine days apart last year.
“They were always pretty strong and healthy, and they were my best friends, my dad and my stepmother. We were so close, just a very connected family,” she explained. “My stepmother got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and they both died. My dad, basically, could have lived. He just wanted to be with her.” Janice died holding his hand, she said.
Her father, she continued, died of kidney failure—a condition that might have been reversible, had he not just lost the love of his life. “I say this in the show; he told me he wasn’t afraid of dying at all, but he was scared it would hurt. … His doctor called and said, ‘He has to be in the hospital. He’s dying.’ And I said, ‘We promised him no more hospital. I don’t know what to do.’ And he said, ‘You know what? Maybe he’d live longer in the hospital, but they’d be hospital days, and he’s surrounded by family. The way he’s going to die is through kidney failure, and that happens to be a painless death.’ And I was so excited! I went into his room, and I go, ‘Dad, great news!’” she laughed.
When I asked her to tell me about Schleppy, she said he owned a discount women’s clothing store in Bedford, New Hampshire, called Crazy Sophie’s Factory Outlet. With his thick Boston accent, he voiced his own ads: “Spend your money at Crazy Sophie’s, when you care enough to buy the very best, but you’re too cheap!”
She described him as a funny character with a huge heart. As an example, she pointed to the years when he’d keep the vestibule inside the store’s front door open and heated so the area’s homeless people had somewhere warm to sleep.
Clearly, Schleppy was an enormous influence on his daughter, who not only seems to have inherited his love of life and laughter, but also his sharp take on society’s ills. Silverman’s outspoken, at times even heroic, contempt for racism, sexism, homophobia, and certain politicians, along with her wry sense of humor, most certainly were influenced by Schleppy.
“He hated rich people,” she said, remembering how her father would watch people from inside Starbucks. “A guy would pull in with, like, a Bentley, and he’d go, ‘Good for you! You need a Bentley! That could probably feed 100,000 people in India, but good for you! Now everybody knows you’re rich!’ Then, of course, when I started making money, he was like, ‘I’m never flying coach again!’”
Vivid memories like these, Silverman insists, are what make a show like this funny.
Her previous tour, Grow Some Lips, concluded with an HBO special that dropped immediately following her parents’ deaths. Following that, she was at square one, material-wise. “Everything I had to talk about was them,” she said, explaining that the seed for Postmortem was the eulogy she gave for her father, because he was so funny. The show grew from there.
How do you make this subject matter funny? That, she said, is where comedians are born.
“For all comics, it’s a survival skill we innately learn as children to get through childhood or some kind of trauma,” she said. “But I do think that I’ve always talked about the darkest corners of humanity, and in some ways, this is no different.”
Despite the content that seemed to come easily to her, she said that touring stand-up is, and always has been, a messy business—one she loves for the excitement and feedback it offers, but one which, by necessity, is the work of polishing a diamond.
“The tour will lead up to taping my special, and I’m messy. I have notes. That’s always been how I am,” she said. “But doing a tour before a special, the audience is so important. They’re 50 percent of this. I need the crowd… You can’t write a comedy special in front of your bathroom mirror. You need a crowd.”
Each crowd and each location is different, she said, and everyone finds different things funny. “I’m just so excited at each show to know what this audience is going to tell me.”
Sarah Silverman is scheduled to perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26 at the Silver Legacy, 407 N. Virginia St., in Reno. Tickets are $66-103. For tickets and information, visit https://www.caesars.com/silver-legacy-reno/shows.