Sarah Silverman looks for common ground.
HOLLYWOOD — Sarah Silverman, during the first test run of her new political variety show, “I Love You, America,” introduced a nude couple in the front row. Next was a generic white male host behind a desk to her right, a familiar face, she said pointedly, for audiences to look to when things get uncomfortable.
But they weren’t the most surprising supporting players on this studio set, which looked like a cross between a roadside diner and an upscale thrift store. That may have been a Trump voter, part of a group of ordinary people interviewed by Silverman, a liberal comedian who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last year. Asked about his support for the president, he explained that Trump had fewer scandals than Hillary Clinton. Silverman cringed and the crowd murmured, anticipating a sharp comeback. Instead, she smiled politely and moved on. Is this really Sarah Silverman? “You’ve never changed someone’s mind by arguing,” she said the next day, sitting on a couch in her office watching footage from the show, which will have its premiere on Hulu on Thursday. “Or facts. Facts don’t change people’s minds, as crazy as that sounds.”
Gesticulating across from a U.S. flag mounted above her desk, Silverman said there are enough comedians on television, sure of their rightness, explaining why their opponents are wrong. “I am interested in hearing about people’s feelings, and as corny and hippie-granola as it sounds, it is the root of everything,” she said.
Silverman, 46, one of the greatest standup comics of her generation, pioneered a swaggeringly feminine brand of raunchy, button-pushing humor that paved the way for comics like Amy Schumer and Ali Wong. In recent years, she has pivoted from this style, embracing a more earnestly engaged voice. With this new show she moves even further away, risking alienating
her fans and experimenting with the limits of political comedy in the Trump era. In this increasingly divisive moment, is there an audience for a comedy show that aims for common ground?
Since Silverman became a star at the start of the new century, the stature of the comedian has shifted away from its roots as spitball-tossing outsider. For better and worse, some stand-ups are now treated like political oracles on social media. And during times of tragedy, late night talk show hosts regularly deliver solemn monologues. On the day I interviewed Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel unleashed a scathing broadside against the Grahamat Cassidy health care bill that dominated the conversation about the legislation the next morning.
While Silverman is avoiding that kind of argumentative tactic in her own
show, she saw his success as supporting her views about change. “He was not a political person at all until it affected his life,” she said of Kimmel, referring to his son, who was born in April with a heart ailment. (Kimmel and Silverman once dated.) “Sometimes, it takes a personal experience to get woke to things.”
Silverman, tall and poised, has a warm presence, listening to questions as intently as she answers them. She sometimes shifts between plain-spoken, even folksy slang and her old kewpie doll voice, code switching between savvy and silly, gimleteyed and wide-eyed.
She grew up in Bedford, N.H., in one of the few Jewish families in her neighborhood. Her mother ran a community theater and her father inherited the family clothing business, passing along his sense of humor. When Silverman was a toddler, he taught her how to say a string of curse words. “She’d sit on his lap — short black bangs, adorable round face — and say this, and we’d all laugh,” recalled her older sister Susan Silverman.
Silverman, whose childhood bedroom ceiling had “I love Steve Martin” written on it, was a comedy prodigy. She told jokes onstage for the first time at 15, and dropped out of college after freshman year at New York University to work clubs; by 22 she joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” She lasted only a year, but sketch comedy and sitcoms were never the goal.
“She was the rare stand-up back then who didn’t see it as a means,” said Sam Seder, who directed Silverman in her first film, “Who’s the Caboose?” “Stand-up was the end.”
Over the next decade, Silverman developed a reputation as a sharp joke writer and performer, but she burst on the national scene in 2001 after saying a racial slur for Chinese people on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” that drew condemnation and an apology from the talk show. She debated Guy Aoki, of the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans, on “Politically Incorrect.”
“That whole Conan controversy made me famous,” she said. “I’m not proud of it but I have to admit it.”
In 2005, Silverman had a major breakthrough with “Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic,” an influential off-Broadway show turned feature film where she made elegantly crafted jokes in the voice of a naively offensive Jewish woman. Building jokes about rape, the Holocaust, AIDS and race, she used what she calls her “unreliable narrator” character to distance herself from her material.
She received many glowing reviews, but a critique from A.O. Scott in The New York Times made her take a hard look at her act. It argued that her kind of ironic, transgressive humor flatters herself and her audience, playing it safe. “Looking back now, I was playing an ignorant character, but I also really was ignorant,” she said.
“I Love You, America” marries a longrunning interest in scatological humor and stomping on taboos with a new, more politically conscious voice.
The presidential election was clearly a turning point for Silverman. On the night Donald Trump won, Silverman was walking her dog when her sister called. “She was sobbing, beside herself, like her guts were coming out,” Susan Silverman said, “but in that conversation, she said we have to start listening to each other and can’t go on like this in our own echo chambers.”
Silverman has done more dramatic acting of late (see the current “Battle of the Sexes”) but after a few narrative pilots for television didn’t work out, she decided she wanted to try something closer to stand-up, a show where she plays herself, looks at the camera and talks to people who don’t necessarily agree with her. But it’s not easy.
She invited the conservative comic Dennis Miller to be a guest, but he turned her down. When she noticed that Ivanka Trump followed her on Twitter, she sent her a direct message, saying she has a chance to make a difference. No response, she said. (“I’ve given up on her since.”) And her forays into red state America for her show have led to culture clashes.
But, Silverman spends more time listening than fact-checking, which may not satisfy liberals who delight in seeing John Oliver or Samantha Bee eviscerate conservatives. At the same time, it’s hard to see Trump voters thinking this segment is for them either.
The most obviously commercial aspect of the show may be Silverman’s star power. A live-wire performer, she has a sly, teasing sensibility that has always been far too off-kilter to be blandly relatable. Whether she has enough room to roam will likely be crucial to the show’s success.
Silverman finds the uncertainty of her own future exciting. “I might become a staunch Republican,” she said, shrugging. “Joan Rivers said she didn’t really find her voice until 70. So I’m on the edge of my seat.”