Sarah Silverman isn’t afraid to be frank. She’s managed to build an impressive career out of comedy that addresses taboo and controversial subjects—homophobia, politics, religion, and racism, for example—yet winning fans over with her adorable, little-girl voice; her enormous, friendly smile; and her ability to be lovably earnest while at the same time flat-out, wickedly funny. In her new Postmortem tour, which makes its way to Reno on Oct. 26, Silverman unearths comedy from perhaps the most unlikely source of all: her parents’ deaths.
Not quite sold? She jokingly admits that she herself is unsure how to sell the show based on its subject matter. “Oh, it’s about your parents dying? Where can I buy tickets?” she joked.
Nonetheless, in our short conversation via Zoom, she shared poignant memories of her larger-than-life father, Donald Silverman, known affectionately by those closest to him as Schleppy, and from her stories it’s already obvious how the show works comedically. First, she explains, her father and stepmother, Janice, died nine days apart last year…