Sarah Silverman Stole Punchlines From Her Dad’s Eulogy for Her Act

“My parents were dying,” Sarah Silverman recently told The Guardian. “I was living in their apartment and taking care of them. So when I went back to stand-up, the first material I tried out was stolen from my eulogy at my dad’s funeral. I thought, ‘There’s funny stuff in here!’”

That material, along with other jokes that didn’t originate at funerals, serves as the foundation for Silverman’s upcoming Netflix special, PostMortem. The official blurb: “Following the recent death of both of her parents, comedian Sarah Silverman finds comedy in the darkest corners of life. 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.”

Mourning her parents through comedy just makes sense to Silverman. “It is very natural to me that processing death — especially big ones like this, they were like my best friends — it feels very natural to process it through stand-up,” she told St. Louis Public Radio while touring the show.

It’s far from the first time she’s joked about her parents in her act. She turned them into characters for Jerry Seinfeld…

…and got a lot of early notoriety out of jokes like this one in her breakthrough Jesus Is Magic special: “I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother!’”

Her dad, affectionately known to friends as Schleppy, was an essential part of her comedian origin story, as she describes in her memoir, The Bedwetter. “When I was three years old, I learned to swear from my father, but he taught me with every intention to do so,” she wrote. “It was like he was teaching a ‘cursing as a second language’ course for one. ‘Bitch! Bastard! Damn! Shit!’ I proclaimed with joy, if not necessarily wit, in the middle of Boys’ Market in Manchester, New Hampshire. Random shoppers stopped in the aisle, and watched me with delight — or at least curiosity — as I regurgitated this mantra. Dad stood by with genuine pride, beaming through the mock surprise on his face.”

Silverman was addicted to the laughs, “so easy” and “so greatly rewarded.” Making people laugh with inappropriate material? “I guess I’m saying that I’m, in most ways, my father’s fault.”

But does that give her the right to trot out family history for comedy, especially about people who are no longer around to object to specific jokes? 

“Dad and (stepmother) Janice would’ve loved it,” she argues. “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 tip-off?’”

Now she has PostMortem merch, though her dad won’t get to wear it. As Silverman joked to Stephen Colbert earlier this year, “I just really feel my parents would want me to monetize this.”