Sarah Silverman has a new special coming that focuses on the death of her parents, and she knows how that looks. “They both gave me so much, and most recently about an hour of new material,” she jokes in the PostMortem trailer. “This seems like a good time to mention I do have merch this tour,” she adds. “I just really feel like my parents would want me to monetize this.”
The comic’s father Donald Silverman died in May 2023 from kidney-related health issues just days after his wife (and Sarah’s stepmother) died of pancreatic cancer. In the special, “comedian Sarah Silverman finds comedy in the darkest corners of life,” the synopsis proclaims. “She hilariously navigates the absurdities of death with her signature wit, from unexpectedly finding the ‘deal of a lifetime’ while planning their funerals to cherishing the bittersweet experience of hearing her mother’s last words.”
PostMortem is Silverman’s second special for Netflix, following 2017’s A Speck Of Dust (in between, she premiered the 2023 HBO special Someone You Love). Speaking with The Guardian last month, Silverman shared the grief-based genesis of the show. “My parents were dying. I was living in their apartment and taking care of them. So when I went back to standup, the first material I tried out was stolen from my eulogy at my dad’s funeral. I thought, ‘There’s funny stuff in here!'” Far from being offended that their daughter was mining her mourning for material, Silverman says, “Dad and Janice would’ve loved it. If he’d been alive, my dad would’ve been head-to-toe in the merch. He used to be like, ‘Somehow it came up in conversation that you were my daughter.’ And I’m like, ‘Maybe it was the T-shirt, the sweatshirt, the hat you’re wearing, from all the shows I’ve been on—maybe that was a bit of a tipoff?'” PostMortem premieres on Netflix May 20.
