A standup great shows off what they do best in new special Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love – streaming on Neon. Steve Newall dug this solid set from a comedy all-timer.
With a seeming surfeit of standup on our screens, and a trend towards big hooks in specials, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the regular ol’ standup set has fallen out of favour. But as Sarah Silverman demonstrates in her new HBO special Someone You Love, sometimes all you really do need is a comedian, a microphone, and material that doesn’t have to stray too confessional.
OK, Someone You Love is bracketed by a scripted intro and outro. It begins with interplay between Silverman and her “triplets” side of stage, before she… compliments(?) her childminder by happily sharing that people had told her not to get “a hot nanny”. The seconds of silence that follow reverberate to comic effect.
An hour later, Boston’s Wilbur Theatre miraculously loses its audience, and the stage is given over to Silverman showing off her pipes with a typically puerile musical number (note: this is A Good Thing). Accompanied by strings and a choir, it serves up a bit of extra dessert at the conclusion of her set.
Bookended between these, you’ll find a standup set that doesn’t shy away from contemporary issues (sorry, but not sorry, Nazis), that sees Silverman comfortable both in her wheelhouse and in front of a hometown audience. Some standup specials are inspired by making big personal revelations or take heavy turns—with Silverman herself sharing a health scare in previous special A Speck of Dust.
But the origins of Someone You Love are more prosaic—and I kinda dig it. Silverman shot a pre-pandemic pilot for HBO that the network didn’t pick up, a weekly half-hour political show à la John Oliver or Bill Maher. “I was gutted. I was so bummed,” Silverman told the New Yorker. “When a pilot doesn’t go, you’re always bummed. I was, like, ‘I can’t believe they’re blowing this opportunity!’ Every shit I take is the greatest thing ever made, in my view.”
That deal left Silverman owing a special, and the network came calling when standup resumed post-lockdown. Perhaps unsurprisingly, HBO didn’t jump at the chance to name the special after Silverman’s tour (Grow Some Lips). As well as a new name for the special, Silverman had to get her hour together, something she worked on during the tour, and makes Someone You Love what it is—a solid standup set by an all-timer.
The title takes on maybe more resonance in hindsight. The end credits declare “For Donald and Janice Silverman”, a dedication to Silverman’s parents who passed away within days of each other in May. While this grief may be explored on stages in the future, Someone You Love was taped as a two-night stand in March, before her loss, and takes its title from a gag in the show. It also, as Silverman notes, lines up with previous special titles Jesus is Magic, We Are Miracles and A Speck of Dust.
Kicking off with what she describes to her audience as “a joke book style joke”, Silverman answers a riddle that I hope to see in my next Christmas cracker (yes, for multiple reasons, this would not be appropriate): “What did the Jewish mother say to her porn star daughter after watching her in a gangbang?”
Dear reader, now I know the answer (and you can too by watching the special—no Jewish mother gangbang joke spoilers here at Flicks).
After this auspicious intro, Silverman continues on familiar territory with jokes about the Holocaust—or as the comedian (Jewish, liberal and vehemently anti-Nazi, I should stress) sarcastically labels a one point “the alleged Holocaust”; swimming pools, prunes and diarrhoea; and kids, religion and hell. She’s great at this stuff, the audience knows it, and it plays really well at home.
Someone You Love finds a bit more venom as Silverman takes on anti-abortionists and their absurd not-to-scale foetus signs (“If foetuses were poster-sized, those people would probably hunt them”). And, not for the first or last time in her special (or comedy career, to be honest), Silveman revels in being a bit of a shit by teasing Hitler about Mein Kampf aka My Struggle: “Is there a more Jewish-sounding book than actual Hitler’s book?”
“Should I call the special My Struggle, wouldn’t that be funny?”
I mean, it would have been (especially re-translated in Germany, as Silverman acknowledges). But hey, here we are. Elsewhere you’ll find bits about toilet paper (and pissing and shitting, naturally), porn, and the stupidity of modern Nazis—the kind of material Silverman delights in, and has pretty much mastered over the decades (as she told Boston.com: “What I find funny sometimes changes, but ultimately stays the same: which is really dumb stuff. Incredibly stupid”).
Fans will enjoy being in familiar territory as Someone You Love delivers a solid hour of laughs. If you need something more political and topical, Silverman is posting up a storm on Instagram about the actors’ strike (spoiler—she’s no fan of scab productions). That may be a little closer to what she was hoping to do each week for HBO, but while her pilot might not have happened, there’s still this great hour in which to enjoy her hilarious company in your living room.
