Unlike her three sisters, Sarah Silverman hasn’t seen signs from her late parents or stepparents, but she has her own ways of keeping them close. “I always email them,” she says. “When you have something to brag about, your parents are the only people in the world that love it. It’s sustenance for them. It makes them so happy. I’ll send some sort of braggy thing like, ‘Guess who I met?’ ”
The Emmy-winning comedian, known for her stand-up routines where no controversial topic is off-limits, is in a reflective state during a Zoom interview from her home in Los Angeles. “Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of my dad dying. It was such a horrible, beautiful, interesting time that kind of left us all just completely depleted and then kind of full again,” says Silverman, 54. Her father, Donald, who owned a discount women’s clothing store, died of kidney failure just nine days after her stepmother, Janice, died of pancreatic cancer. Donald opted against hospital treatment to live out his final moments at home. “He could have probably fought and lived a little longer,” says Silverman. “He wanted to be with Janice.”
Silverman cared for them—or “doula’d” them through death, as she puts it—and detailed it all in a stand-up tour, Postmortem, which was filmed for a new Netflix special streaming now. “At first I was dreading dredging it all up, but by the second half of the tour I got excited each night to tell everybody about my parents,” she says. “It was extremely cathartic.” But she doesn’t want fans to get the wrong idea: “It’s not sad, it’s really funny.”
Silverman was raised in New Hampshire by Donald and her mother, Beth Ann, who divorced when she was 6. “I was thrilled,” she recalls. “My older sisters were very upset, but honestly I still feel I was right on. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to go to sleep to people screaming? Great.’ They really hated each other.”
Each remarried and found their “soulmates,” and “because they were happy,” they eventually became best friends who lived three minutes apart. “When my mom died, she was holding my dad and my stepmother’s hands,” Silverman says.
In the past two years she has relied on the “constant” support of her sisters Susan, 62, Laura, 58, and Jodyne, 54, but says she’s learned over the years that “grief takes care of itself. You don’t have to worry about it.” (Beth Ann died in 2015, and her stepfather, John, died in 2007.) “You can focus on running towards joy, wherever it is.”
Silverman found one of her biggest sources of joy in an unexpected place. During the pandemic she taught herself how to play Call of Duty: WWII to pass the time. After she posted about it on social media, comedian Rory Albanese, whom she had met only once, replied. They played together every night. At first “we were just killing Nazis together,” but after a while “we clearly had feelings for each other.” She recently bought her first house in L.A., and Albanese, 48, moved in. “It’s crazy. I was very peacefully and happily single,” says Silverman, who was last linked to actor Michael Sheen in 2018. “I felt done, to be honest. You just can’t predict anything!”
And she’s ready for whatever comes next in her career, whether it’s more touring, acting or working on her eponymous podcast. “I feel wildly successful in that I am happy, I’m healthy, I’m 54, and I’m still working,” she says. “It’s human nature to be afraid of the unknown, but don’t waste anxiety on the unknown. The unknown is thrilling. We really should just be on the edge of our seat.”
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ELIZABETH WEINBERG/AUGUST; CLIFTON PRESCOD/ NETFLIX; COURTESY SARAH SILVERMAN(3); BRUCE GLIKAS/GETTY IMAGES