Sarah Silverman Wants to Pop Your Bubble
Hollywood, Calif. — 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 Ms. Silverman, a liberal comedian who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last year. Asked about his support for the president, he explained that Mr. Trump had fewer scandals than Hillary Clinton. Ms. 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 Oct. 12. “Or facts. Facts don’t change people’s minds, as crazy as that sounds.”
Gesticulating across from an American flag mounted above her desk, Ms. 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.
Ms. Silverman, 46, one of the greatest stand-up 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 Ms. 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. The day before I interviewed Ms. Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel unleashed a scathing broadsideagainst the Graham-Cassidy health care bill that dominated the conversation about the legislation the next morning.
While Ms. 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 Mr. Kimmel, referring to his son, who was born in April with a heart ailment. (Mr. Kimmel and Ms. Silverman once dated.) “Sometimes, it takes a personal experience to get woke to things.”
Ms. 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, gimlet-eyed and wide-eyed.
She grew up in Bedford, N.H., in one of 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 Ms. 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.