[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My next guest, Sarah Silverman's new special titled Sarah Silverman: Someone You Love. It's full of her cheeky, mischievous and thought-provoking comedy, all the way up to its closing original song Something to Tell You. Here's a clip.

MUSIC-Something to Tell You

I got something to tell you, but I don't want to tell you

But your breath smells like the sh** of a really sick dog

I got something to tell you, but you won't like it

Fine, I'll tell you, but your breath smells like a stomach ache feels

Also, when we are in a quiet car, and you bite into an apple

The sound of your chewing makes me want to f**ing die

Oh, and one more thing, well, actually two little things

And they are in the corners of your gross mouth

Go like this.

A hilarious hummable song from Sarah Silverman should be no surprise, considering she's already written a musical titled Bedwetter which ran off Broadway last year. Since it's run ended last summer, she found time to do a stand-up tour, produce a new comedy special, guest host The Daily Show, and host her own podcast The Sarah Silverman Podcast. On the podcast, she shows a different side of herself, a more "earnest side" as she says in the special, while also advising listeners who leave her voice mails. You can listen to the podcast on your platform of choice, and stream the new comedy special on Max. Oh yes, she rocks as the not-so princessy Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph, I think some of her best work. Sarah, nice to meet you.

Sarah: Oh, my gosh, it's so nice to meet you. It was very exciting to watch you sing along to that.

Alison Stewart: I can't believe I know the words. [laughs] That was the end of the special. You open the set with a pornography joke and then go straight into the Holocaust. What have you learned about what makes a strong intro to a comedy special?

Sarah: Oh, I don't know. That isn't something that I have a lesson about. I never really think about it. Of course, you want to start strong. It felt like a joke in a vacuum a little bit, and it was a strong open and gets everyone awake.

Alison Stewart: How important is that first joke?

Sarah: It's probably pretty important. People decide if they're going to stay tuned or not.

Alison Stewart: Is it really that significant? Will people just tune out if you can't get them in the first 10, 15?

Sarah: I don't know. Probably not, I guess. I don't know. It depends on, are they going, "I don't know about this," or if they're like, "Yes, let's do it."

Alison Stewart: "Let's go in." How do you test material?

Sarah: Going on stage, doing stand-up. That's the thing about stand-up, is you can't really practice in front of the bathroom mirror, or you can only so much. It's a one-person sport, but it really isn't. It's a team sport. Listen, sometimes the audience will not laugh at something that I know is good, and I'll stick with it, and stick with it, but eventually either I find that little skeleton key that makes it work, or I have to give up on it.

Alison Stewart: Where do you stand in the lines of locking up phones in comedy clubs? A lot of comics will say, "Yes, you got to put your phone in the pouch so that I can work on material." Other folks say, "You know what, go for it. I'm not going to be concerned about it." How are you feeling about phones in comedy clubs?

Sarah: I love when theaters or clubs have the pouch. I think it's amazing. Technology is like the wild west because something will open up a new area and then there's no rules around it. With people recording, to a degree, it doesn't matter unless they have a large platform, but there's a reason why you work clubs for a while and do it live. That's our whole livelihood, and it should be our choice if we want it to go on a platform or something. Also, comedy is about, as corny or trite as it sounds, is like finding that line, going past it, finding where it is and finding where it is includes going past it.

In these times where our very worth is litigated daily, you need a safe, I'm using a lot of language, you need a safe space to try that stuff. Also, I used to feel hurt if they would announce, "Please don't take out your camera," whatever, don't. Then, you go out, and they do it anyway, because they are asked not to. Now I don't really care. I understand it. People can't help themselves. Usually before I go out, I'll make an announcement. I'll go like, "Hey, it's me," from the off-stage mic, just say, "I'm going to play a song." Usually I'll play a Pretenders song. I don't know, I just picked Stop Your Sobbing.

Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest to Sarah Silverman. Her new special is called Someone You Love. I just lost a bet, Sarah. It's okay, she's mouthing "I'm so sorry." I lost a bet. I'm going to have to buy coffee now, because you cursed.

Sarah: This is live. This is live?

Alison Stewart: This is live. [laughs]

Sarah: Oh, my gosh. I don't know why, it's so easy to just say stuff. I'm going to play this Pretenders song, you get yourself together in that time, maybe power down your phones. You don't have to be a vessel through which Facebook expresses yourself. Let's have an experience. It's like people who take pictures of fireworks. If you want great pictures of fireworks, Google them. The idea of fireworks, I'm not a big fireworks person personally because I have a dog, but it's the experience. It's the live experience. It's very odd that people have this, like, "Oh, I need to capture it." You're never going to go back. You can Google pictures of me that are much better than what your phone will take, and you can actually have an experience, us together. It doesn't bother me anymore that much.

Alison Stewart: The special, ends with the audience disappearing, and you sit down at the piano, and you start to sing that song we just heard, and then a chamber group comes in, and then a children's choir appears. You sing about this really gross person whose breath smells and that has junk on their face. Where did the song come from?

Sarah: Thin air. Listen, certain people have bad breath or whatever, but I'll tell you what it came from. I play guitar a bit, but I have a piano and I don't really play it, so I have been teaching myself piano. I'm playing chords, and I just was saying words to it, making up just silly words to it, and then that's just what it became. If you watch, there's not much of an Easter egg, but after the credits, there's just phone footage that my manager took of one of our first dates on the tour, and I have just the first two lines, and I'm playing it because there's a piano backstage where I was playing. I didn't know she was recording it. I just was playing. I only heard those first two lines. Throughout the tours, about two, three months, I finished it, and then we recorded it.

Alison Stewart: I'm thinking about Bedwetter. I saw Bedwetter, it was so great. I'm hoping--

Sarah: You did?

Alison Stewart: Oh, I cannot walk by 20th Street without singing [sings] I'm a bedwetter. There are a couple of ear worms. I'm not musical. I think we actually interviewed the director on the show. I think we did.

Sarah: Annie.

Alison Stewart: Annie, yes. You mentioned on the New Yorker profile that you were still working on it. Is there a chance Bedwetter is going to come back?

Sarah: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Knock wood?

Sarah: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn from that experience? What did you take away from that experience that you think will really be useful to you?

Sarah: Oh my gosh, that's such a great question and such a hard one to answer pre-coffee. That's an excuse. [chuckles] Sorry, I was catching myself. That was me qualifying what I might say, and then, now this is me stalling while I think of something to say. What did I learn? So much. I've always been a fan of theater. I grew up doing theater locally in New Hampshire. My mom was the theater director at a local college, and she would take us to plays in Boston at the Wilbur Theater where I shot my special. Anyway, it's such a process. It's been 12, 13 years since we started working on it, and of course, I worked on it with my friend Adam Schlesinger, who didn't get to see it come to fruition, came so close and died of COVID April 1st, 2020.

It's a slow process. It's a meticulous process. The process is a big part of it. Of course, that's maybe a silly thing to say, but especially working with this director Annie Kaufman, who-- I'm used to being in control of everything I put out in a lot of ways, mostly. This is my life. There are parts of rehearsal where I go, "You know what? I think I am best used not here." Because it's hard for me to watch. She experiments. Let's try it this way. Sometimes she'll have an actor do something that she has no intention to use, but to get them out of their selves, and that process is so interesting to watch, and it's given me an incredible amount of patience, I think.

The rewards are so cool because it gets better. It's like the way Pixar or Disney movies work, their animated movies. It starts and it's good, and then it gets better and better and more layered, and the animators work off of what they see that's been recorded so far, and then that inspires the writers to go a different way, and then that animators change. It just gets richer and more layered, and I feel like that happens in the best-case scenario with theater.

Alison Stewart: Sounds like patience is something that you got out of it.

Sarah: Yes. That would've been the more concise answer. Patience. I got patience out of it. It's a process. Stand-up is a process, but it's so singular in a lot of ways. It doesn't feel that way maybe.

Alison Stewart: My guess-- [crosstalk]

Sarah: I'm not happy with that answer on live radio.

Alison Stewart: You know what? We're going to take a break.

Sarah: [unintelligible 00:13:39] could've done better.

Alison Stewart: We're going to take a break. You can revise and edit during our 92nd break. My guest is Sarah Silverman. We'll be right back after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Sarah Silverman. Her specialist called Someone You Love on Max. You can also listen to The Sarah Silverman Podcast. You've been very open that the special came out of a deal that you had with HBO to make a pilot, and then you owed them a special as well. When you were working on the material for the special, was it specifically for the special, or were these things that you'd been thinking about for a while?

Sarah: Oh, that's always that way. I'm always working on stand-up, and I never think about doing a special for some reason. This is only my fourth special. I've been doing standup for 30 years, or I guess probably been 18 years since my first special or so. I don't think of myself as wildly prolific, but I'm always doing stand-up. I don't think about it until an entity says, "Do you want to do a special?" I go, "Oh, yes, I guess." I was already in process, and it was pre-pandemic, right before the pandemic, 2019, the end of 2019. I've done a couple interviews, a couple people have said that, like, "You've been very open about--"

It surprises me because I go, "Is that weird to reveal? I don't know. Is that an embarrassing thing or is that something that's maybe telling tales on the network? I don't know. It just is." I had a pilot with them, and part of that deal was a special, and the pilot didn't go, but I still loved the special, but I don't know. When I hear that, like, "You've been very open about--" then I go like, "Was that something I should have concealed or was it uncouth?"

Alison Stewart: I found it refreshing. It's transparent. It's like this is the way the business works, and these things just don't happen out of magic, poof, "Oh, here's a special, oh, here." Sometimes really talented people make pilots and they don't go, and that's the way it goes.

Sarah: Oh, no, the pilot was, this is only my opinion, phenomenal. [laughs] I feel they did made a terrible decision, but I'm glad because the pandemic happened and I started doing a podcast and I get everything I wanted from that, I get from that. Now, I would rather act or something with the time I have left, but not the time I have left on this earth. I mean other than podcasts and other things.

Alison Stewart: On your podcast, you talked about your earnest compared to some of your other work. How did you find your voice as a podcaster?

Sarah: Limits are good for me. [chuckles] I knew this isn't coming from a creative choice, but it became a creative choice, which is, I can't stomach the thought of asking people to be guests on a podcast. I don't want to ask my friends to be a guest on the podcast. I don't want to count on strangers to be-- As I'm saying this, I'm realizing this is what you do best- [crosstalk].

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:17:37] you have bookers.

Sarah: -and I'm- [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:17:37] really good right now.

Sarah: - feeling really good right now on this show. [laughs] No, I'm not doing you a favor, you're doing me a favor. I would feel like I would be asking many favors. I knew I just wanted to just talk, and not rely on booking people. That was one limit that helped me form this. I really wanted to hear from strangers. I wanted to hear from people, just whatever they were thinking, whatever was on their mind, personal, big picture stuff, anything. We get calls and my producer Raj Desai will pick 20 of them and send them to me, and I usually listen to them the day before and just get an idea. I'll make notes in our Google Doc. "Oh, maybe I want to say something like this."

I'll make some notes for myself. Sometimes I won't and I'll just go in cold. The callers are the trajectory of the show. It makes it easier in a way because that's where we go. We just go from one call to the other, and that's how each episode susses out. Sometimes I say something if it's on my mind at the top of the show, and that's that. Sometimes it's funny and silly, sometimes it's very serious. Sometimes it's too serious. [chuckles] I don't know.

It's just however direction it goes, and it's really become almost an advice show despite myself, but I always say, "Look, I'm talking out of my butt here, but I'm someone who has some lived experience who's very interested in the dynamics between people and how our histories macro and micro affect our now and unlearning the stuff that doesn't serve us and seeing it in others is much easier than seeing it in yourself, but also seeing it in myself and being vulnerable enough to say I interrupt people a lot and that's ego stuff and I'm learning, and I'm working on that." I'm a part of it. I'm not a doctor and I don't necessarily know better but I go to therapy and I learn, I get really excited. Half the notes on this desk are from therapy, but they inform a lot of what I do.

Alison Stewart: We take a lot of calls on the show and I can tell what's on people's minds, even if it's not really the subject matter. Sometimes you can hear that people are thinking things or that there's something that's bothering them, even though the call-in is about plants or something. What have you noticed that's on people's minds from the calls you're getting in?

Sarah: Well, the obvious is just the feeling of division in the country and within people's families. I'm interested in the micro and then the big picture and how they are so totally connected. I also got a chance to really experience, as a comic, we travel the country. Half of my tour was in states where abortion is illegal, so you get a bead on really pronouncing it since I learned it was bead and not beat, by the way. A real bead on--

Alison Stewart: That's an old champing at the bit, instead of chomping moment.

Sarah: Ooh, ooh. Wait, tell me then champing on the bit.

Alison Stewart: It's champing at the bit, not chomping.

Sarah: Champing at the bit.

Alison Stewart: It's like a horse, a bit in the horse's mouth. Champing at the bit.

Sarah: Oh, the bit in the horse's mouth, that's what we're talking about.

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry [unintelligible 00:22:08] to interrupt you.

Sarah: No. Oh, let me tie it all together, Alison Stewart. I love learning those. It was just last week on the podcast, I think it comes out tomorrow, when someone called in and said, "You were saying how you--" I was giving advice to someone and saying what the search words should be in their search bar of looking for a group therapy thing, or I don't know what I was advising them. You could search this comma this. He goes, "And you're saying comma?" He was like, "Search bars don't read commas. You put commas on there?" And I was like, "Yes. How do you separate thoughts and stuff?" You knew this, that it doesn't read commas. How did that mi--" Why is my alarm going off? Oh my gosh. I'm sorry.

Alison Stewart: It's okay. Can I play just a little piece of Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph before we run out of time? This is Vanellope. She's a princess being surrounded by other princesses who want to know what her deal is.

Vanellopee: Hi.

Princesses: Whoa.

Vanellopee: Whoa, whoa, ladies, I'm a princess too.

Princesses: What kind of a princess are you? Do you have magic hair?

Vanellopee: No.

Princesses: Magic hands?

Vanellopee: No.

Princesses: Do animals talk to you?

Vanellopee: No.

Princesses: Were you poisoned?

Vanellopee: No.

Princesses: Cursed?

Vanellopee: No.

Princesses: Kidnapped or enslaved?

Vanellopee: No. Are you guys okay? Should I call the police?

Alison Stewart: Oh God, I just love that clip.

Vanellopee: Are you okay? Do you want me to call the police?

Alison Stewart: I love that part. I think it's such a good part for girls and boys to see this little tough race car driving princess.

Sarah: Ugh, I love her so much. [chuckles] That made me so happy. That was in the sequel. In the first one I begged them, and they totally did, to not give me a little tiny Disney waste. I said, "Please, it's not attainable. Why are we doing this to girls?" To their credit, they didn't.

Alison Stewart: Oh, nice.

Sarah: She just has a real body. So nice. I feel like that scene really addresses that in a way.

Alison Stewart: The name of the special is Someone You Love. It is on Max. The podcast is The Sarah Silverman Podcast. We didn't get to talk about your Daily Show run. Is that something you'd like to do daily?

Sarah: It's something I loved doing and would love to do, but it would keep me from doing anything else because I don't have the stamina to do that and then do stand-up on the weekends. I don't think Nana could do all of it.

Alison Stewart: Nana Silverman, thank you for being with us.

Sarah: Oh, thank you so much. Sorry you lost that bet.

Alison Stewart: It's all right. Comes with the territory. Good territory though. Thanks, Sarah. There's more All Of It on the way right after the news.

 

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