Sarah Silverman shows up to a Zoom window the same way she shows up to a stage: disarming, razor-sharp, and ready to dismantle any assumption you brought with you. Even geography. When I tell her I’m in Louisville, she leans in with a curious “Kentucky?” like she’s pulled an unexpected tarot card. “I know almost nothing about Kentucky,” she says. “Other than Mitch McConnell… and Sturgill Simpson.” A cosmic balance of darkness and light. She’s working with a clean slate.
Silverman is here because she’s released Someone You Love, the audio version of her latest special—an album that, for a comic as expressive as she is, somehow makes perfect sense. “Comedy albums are the best,” she says. “Steve Martin, Brian Regan, Robin Williams at the Met… I grew up on all of that.” She starts listing titles like she’s reciting a family tree. “There’s something classic about comedy that’s just audio. It’s theater of the mind.”
And she means it. She talks about discovering performers long before she ever saw what they looked like—the way an album creates a universe that reality later ruins. When I bring up Mitch Hedberg, we both have the same story: you hear the album, imagine the man, then YouTube comes along and your internal casting director gets fired on the spot. “Your own creativity finishes the circle,” she says. “Sometimes seeing it breaks the spell.”
Even on her own special, the visual gags aren’t what linger. She tells a story about coming home alone at night, stepping into a dark apartment, and nervously calling out in a ridiculously deep voice—“hellooo?”—a tiny moment that absolutely everyone has secretly lived. Women in particular, she tells me, keep bringing it up. “It resonated with people,” she says. “Especially women just going, yeah… that’s exactly what I do.”
The new album is out through Nashville powerhouse Thirty Tigers, with a vinyl edition coming in December. “I always do a little vinyl,” she says, laughing at the idea of comedy purists clutching LPs like sacred texts. “It’s for a small group of people, but those people care.” Silverman doesn’t romanticize analog, though. “People talk about loving vinyl, and that’s totally valid,” she says. “I just… don’t have the equipment set up. There are a million digital ways to listen now.” She’s halfway through admitting this when she breaks: “My boyfriend keeps saying we need a record player. I’ve bought so many over the years.” They die lonely, unused deaths in closets everywhere.
But music—despite always lurking in the corner of her work—is something she refuses to take too seriously. “I’m an excellent musician and singer… for a comedian,” she says. She’s written serious songs, but most stay locked away like forbidden artifacts. “Nobody wants a comedian’s heartfelt song,” she insists. Except, of course, they sometimes do.
I bring up her duet with Natalie Maines for Howard Stern—something Silverman admits started genuinely emotional before spiraling, as intended, into comedic absurdity. “Howard fans loved it,” she says. “Natalie made it a real song. I drove to her house, and by the time I got there she already had harmonies. She changed lines and made it funnier. She made it better.”
Silverman’s relationship with music widened through her friendship with the late Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. Her voice softens immediately. “I just knew him because I was a fan,” she says. They bonded over depression—how to manage it, how to stay afloat. “He helped me get out of a downward spiral,” she says quietly. When I mention Frank Turner’s tribute song “A Wave Across a Bay,” she immediately queues it up. “Sometimes Scott’s music is just too hard to listen to now,” she says. “But I love it so much.”
Of course, depression and mental health are the gravitational center of her podcast, which returns October 17 on Lemonada. She never intended it to become a kind of global confessional booth. “I didn’t want guests,” she says. “I have too much fear around asking people to do my podcast.” So she took calls instead—and discovered people will tell her anything. “There’s something about comedians,” she says. “People feel like they know you. Like they can just… talk.”
She’s self-aware bordering on brutal about it. “Sometimes I listen back and I’m embarrassed by the gall I have. I’m talking out of my ass! But I try to be clear: I don’t know the answers. Here’s what I think.”
It’s a strange miracle: a comedian who made her name on provocation now spending her days talking people back from personal ledges. “It’s been exciting,” she says. “To put my brain toward things that matter. Things that everyone goes through.”
We wrap with the obligatory compliments—her special is hilarious, her music underrated, her honesty radioactive in the best way. She shrugs them off with her usual mix of gratitude and discomfort. It’s very Sarah Silverman: unwilling to pretend she’s an oracle, but more than willing to help you feel less alone.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
