Sarah Silverman Is the Troll Slayer

You're gonna need a moment to get used to this new Sarah Silverman, but I assure you it's worth it. Come with me for a visit and just know, before we go in, that we are a long way away from the Jesus Is Magic Silverman. You know the one. The “I don't care if you think I'm racist; I just want you to think I'm thin” Silverman. The extended-Aristocrats-joke-about-getting-raped-by-Joe-Franklin Silverman. That Silverman was an aggressively detached stoner girl who rose to fame by dabbling in surrealistic filth and turning epithets over on themselves, who was the MVP of nearly every celebrity roast, who got into a public feud with an Asian-American civil rights activist over using the word “chink” in a joke she told on Conan, who once did a bit about deboning Ethiopian babies in order to harvest precious gems, and who once did an entire episode of her own Comedy Central show in blackface.

We are, with good reason, miles from all that. I'm here now with the fully refurbished Sarah Silverman, inside her charmingly cluttered two-bedroom Los Angeles apartment. She's lived here for roughly a dozen years—never going full Hollywood and buying the Fuck You house—and each item is imbued with her distinctive blend of sweetness and impishness. There are big canvas photos on the wall of friends and family members and fellow comics. There's a fancy Japanese toilet that will troll unsuspecting male guests by automatically lowering its seat mid-piss; I may or may not have audibly whooped when it got me. There's a priceless Steinway piano that was taken by accident (Scout's honor) from music producer Jon Brion's apartment while he was asleep.

There's also a three-foot-high resin statue of a Minotaur literally sitting on the kitchen counter and reading. Silverman's former boyfriend, actor Michael Sheen, was really into Minotaurs (who isn't?!), so she bought him one. When the couple amicably broke up and Sheen moved back to his native UK, the Minotaur did not go with him. He's free to claim it anytime he likes, but let's be real: It's staying here. It's Sarah's Minotaur now.

“It's so vulnerable,” she says.

And it's just like the Sarah Silverman of 2018 to find vulnerability in even the most savage of beasts.

Silverman has always been something of an anomaly, occupying her own special corner of the universe. She was the only Jewish girl her age at school in her home state of New Hampshire. She was a vegetarian back when vegetarians were freaks; one time, she says, a schoolyard bully held her down and force-fed her lunch meat. Not only was she one of the few female comics to emerge from the boys' club that was the '90s comedy scene; she managed to be raunchier than all of those boys in the process.

And now she's an anomaly among comics because she's decided to become, well, NICE. For her Hulu talk show, I Love You, America, Silverman has declared she wants to purge, in her words, “the cunty part of me,” and perhaps the cunty part of America in the process. This is why, for remote segments, she ventures out into Trump country (Texas and Louisiana) and attempts to embrace Middle Americans rather than mock them, to get at “the symptoms of why we are where we are.” She does not necessarily coddle the red-staters she meets on the show. She argues with them about Trump. She playfully challenges them on Obamacare and gay marriage. And, because this is Sarah Silverman we're talking about, she makes a point of asking them if they've ever shit themselves. (SPOILER: They have. I sincerely feel better about the state of affairs because of this.)

She has made herself vulnerable. She has taken the risk of adapting her comedy to a more mature and genuine worldview, and so the obvious question here is: Can she pull it off? Or does being a better person make you a worse comic?

“Comedy by nature is not at all evergreen. So if you're doing it right, you look back at your old stuff and you're horrified,” she tells me. “I don't stand by the blackface sketch. I'm horrified by it, and I can't erase it. I can only be changed by it and move on.”

Did you, at the time, have some awareness that it was fun to get away with a lot of the jokes you performed? Was there a small kick?

“I was praised for it! It made me famous! It was like, I'm playing a character, and I know this is wrong, so I can say it. I'm clearly liberal. That was such liberal-bubble stuff, where I actually thought it was dealing with racism by using racism. I don't get joy in that anymore. It makes me feel yucky. All I can say is that I'm not that person anymore.”

Do you feel funnier now?

“I'm just fundamentally different. You have to take a chance and go with where you are and what is funny to you now. When comics really establish a thing and they get famous for it, a lot of them are really terrified to change. Then they become caricatures of themselves…”

(Here I pause to note that Silverman says this while pantomiming Andrew Dice Clay's classic stage move of wrapping his arm behind his head to smoke a cigarette.)

“…and it can't be who they still are. It's a risk you have to take, or it's just gonna end up being embarrassing.”

What made you change?

“I don't know what the inciting incident was. What I learned from doing this show is…facts, or poll numbers, or any of that shit, it doesn't change anybody's mind. If anything, people dig in deeper. So, I like to be changed by new information. There's so many things we can connect with. We're way more alike than we think. We're just getting our facts from different news sources.”

I dunno. That feels a little bit too even to me, like both-sides-ism.

“You can't even say ‘both sides’ anymore because of what Trump did with it. With fucking talking about Nazis. But I see so many liberals having extreme division among themselves and everything is black-and-white. On social media, it's really become porn. I had the gall to get high one night and watch episodes one and two of Roseanne. And I thought it was lovely. And I have personal friends that went after me on Twitter. All I could think was ‘I spent all Saturday with you. You have my e-mail address. What is your motivation here?’ ”

Who was it?

“You can look for yourself. [Note: It was Kumail Nanjiani.] He was loving but stern. I thought the show was really special because it showed a Trump voter who heard JOBS and voted and has checked out ever since but now finds herself splitting up her meds with her husband because they can't afford them anymore. If Trump voters see that show as a safe space, even better. Because their porcupine needles are down and they're open to things that they maybe wouldn't be open to in other cases.”

I am not as willing as Silverman to forgive Middle America for Trump. There are limits to my empathy. I am on the more shrill end of the liberal spectrum: the guy who bitches every time The New York Times ventures out into Trump country to talk to REAL FOLK, the way Silverman occasionally does on her own show. I fume that it's always incumbent on blue-state America to reach out to red-state America, and not the other way around. I delight in conservatives showing their asses online. I have given up on trying to politely convince the most conservative members of my own family that they are wrong, and try to steer the conversation toward, like, clouds instead. I am, in other words, hardened, perhaps even more so than the rednecks Silverman is aiming to convert.

Silverman can see this, and what she desperately wants people to know is that finding out you're wrong about something won't kill you. We're talking about gun control now (hilarious, I know), and I tell her one of the reasons I admire the Parkland kids so much is that they aren't willing to compromise. They want action, and they aren't willing to play nice over it.

“They're gonna fucking save us,” she tells me.

Ah. But they weren't saying, “We have to be respectful of the other side.”

“I interviewed a guy, Christian Picciolini. Former Nazi skinhead, now works to help people leave extremism and does incredible work. If I met him before he changed, do I write him off? It took one person to have compassion towards him.… That's how people change. My job on the show, for me, is not to change minds. It's to connect. So I know that when I see a bunch of MAGA hats, there's a part of me that gets scared. And you know what? When they see a bunch of… What's the symbol of Hillary or Bernie or whatever symbol of liberalism? Man buns? They also get scared.”

But you're more right to be scared than they are.

“Why?”

Because Trump is clearly awful. Sometimes I think these outreach efforts indulge Trump voters in a way that perhaps they should not be indulged.

“Nobody thinks they're an evil villain.”

Except Putin.

“He's such a super-villain.”

He's just a better super-villain than Trump.

“I would have so much compassion for Trump if he didn't have so much power and wasn't ruining people's lives. But he's super fucked-up. These guys with their daddy issues are getting people killed.”

But I don't think that Trump has moments of self-doubt.

“No, he's empty. If he thought that deep, he'd kill himself. If he was two degrees more onto himself, he would eat a bullet. The lack of awareness keeps him alive. He's such a pussy. Colossal pussy.”

This drive for empathy…this desperate, endearing scramble to find ANY scrap of common ground to cling to with common people, is also why Silverman has used her personal Twitter feed not to ruthlessly own trolls, like your standard celeb slapping down random accounts, J. K. Rowling–style, but rather to neutralize them with kindness. The most famous example was a San Antonio man named Jeremy Jamrozy, who tweeted “CUNT” at Silverman. And really, Sarah Silverman is gonna be the LAST woman on earth to be jarred by that word. Instead of ignoring Jamrozy or beefing with him, Silverman decided, on instinct, to befriend him instead.

“I was walking my dog, and I happened to see his tweet, and then I looked at his timeline, and it was just so clear that he was acting out. It was all just racial slurs and then one thing that said ‘I have severe back pain,’ and I didn't think twice. I just responded, and I was like, ‘You're in a lot of pain.’ ”

“What she said broke through what months and months of therapy couldn't even do,” Jamrozy tells me. “Like, she just broke me down to where she made me more humble and nice and positive. She disarmed me. She's gotten me to feel more spiritual somehow, in a way.” Once Jamrozy softened, Silverman helped him out with his extensive medical bills and sent him resistance bands to help with his crushing back problems. To this day, the two are still friends and DM each other on a daily basis. It's one of those pure, BuzzFeed-y stories that make you forget, at least for the moment, that the world is a shithole. It makes you believe that hearts and minds really can be changed with random acts of love.

She DMs with other Twitter randos, including one dude she's been communicating with for three years. In perhaps a nod to her childhood, she takes pride in being the only Jewish person some of these people have ever interacted with. She wants to connect everyone, and she wants us to heal, and she wants to still be funny in the process. “I try to remember to be dumb” is a rule Silverman abides by. “Anything heavy on the show, we make sure to sandwich in big, bready, silly, aggressively dumb comedy. It's essential.”

That is not always an easy mandate to stick with. No joke Silverman can tell now could possibly be as fucked-up as the world it's told in.

In fact, the most notable moment from the first season of I Love You, America is a monologue in which Silverman, holding back tears, talks about her disgraced friend Louis C.K. If you recall, C.K. admitted to openly masturbating in front of female comics, none of whom asked for such a gesture. Silverman's own sister Laura tweeted that C.K. had also done it in front of her multiple times. There is exactly one joke in that monologue, a good one about “the elephant masturbating in the room.” The studio audience was far too nervous to laugh at it.

As we talk about her old friend, she alternates between sitting on the floor against the front of her couch and lying all the way down on the rug. Like Jamrozy, she has back problems. She has an extra-thick shag carpet to make it comfortable to lie on the floor.

Have you spoken to Louie since his scandal happened?

“Mmm-hmm.”

And what was that conversation like?

“Fuck you! ‘Let me tell GQ about my conversations with Louie.’ Life is complicated. Love is even more complicated. But you can't not do it. I don't have some definitive sound bite or nutshell of how I feel about it, even to myself. But I'm also okay with that.”

Do you hope Louie comes back?

“I think that there are people who were caught and there were people who were not caught, but the important thing is that they are forever changed. And if that's the case, I don't see any reason why they can't continue being artists. Now, whether they're popular artists or not is up to the audience. I have compassion. There are people that just deny everything they're accused of and they continue to be the politicians or the filmmakers that they are. And there are people that come and say, I'm guilty of these things, and I'm wrong, and I want to be changed from this. And yet those are the ones that kind of are excommunicated forever. He's my brother, so it's hard. I may not have a very clear perspective on it, but I'm trying to.”

I almost think that trying is what's important.

“People are very sure about what is right and wrong until it comes to their front door.”

As I talk to her about C.K. in her apartment, there's still the same resignation in her voice that she had during the original monologue, a feeling that her friend's downfall was necessary but that it sucked all the same. Her friendship with C.K. stretches back over two decades, to when they were young N.Y.C. comics and cracking each other up late at night by riding up and down the elevators buck naked. That's a story from her autobiography that used to read as sweet and innocent, but no longer.

This is not the only time Silverman has had to deal with a friend of hers in comedy getting called out by the #MeToo movement. She's still friends with Aziz Ansari. (“I was just like, Gross, I don't wanna know that about Aziz! Hopefully he's dealing with things, looking inward, and will blossom from it.”) She's also still friends with former senator Al Franken and extremely protective of him, which is darkly amusing because in 1993, her first year at SNL, Silverman once stabbed Franken with a pencil. She was aiming for his Afro. You know, as a joke. She got his temple instead. She was not invited back for a second season. Somehow they became buds anyway.

Did you talk to Franken after he had to resign?

“Mmm-hmm. He and [his wife] Franni are devastated. I understand that I may have cognitive distortion, because I love him so much. But all I can say is, and he may not be excited about this, but he has no sexuality. I believe in my heart of heart of hearts he never copped a feel. The sketch, the whole Leeann Tweeden sketch, is online. You can see it for yourself. It's not funny, but it's innocuous. He may have touched some sideboob by accident, or a tush by accident, but I'm telling you, Franni is his best friend and constant companion, and he has eyes for no one else. I've worked with him for years. I'm so sad that he got bullied into resigning, because all he loved in this world was being a senator and representing the people of Minnesota. I've never met a more pure person. On the show, you saw him kiss me on the lips. There is nothing sexual about it. He's a Jewish grandpa. He gives you big, Jewish, wet-lipped kisses. This is a guy whose passion was serving people and making the world a better place. There's a lot of baby-in-bathwater stuff, I think. We'll just get it in the process.”

Since #MeToo happened, do you feel even more aware of your role as a female comic within the industry?

“Women are so keenly aware of the male experience because our entire existence had to be kind of through that lens. Whereas men have never had to understand the female experience in order to exist in the world. We were at a benefit, me and Nick Kroll. And Natasha Leggero was onstage, and she said, ‘How many of you have had a guy jerk off at you in public?’ And every woman raised their hand. Nick was like, ‘Oh, my God, is this a bit that the whole crowd is in on?’ And I was like, ‘What? No.’

“When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh. The women only laugh if their date laughs.’ It's something I actually accepted as an 18-year-old comedian. It took a while for me to say, That's fucking insane. We're all complicit in this fucked-up society; it's just that men actually, truly benefited from it and women didn't.”

There are only ten episodes of I Love You, America out there. (It returns to Hulu this fall, just in time for the midterms.) Like any show in its infancy, it's still trying to sort out exactly what it should be—aren't we all?—which means it's something of a mixed bag. The very best sketch on it involves Silverman visiting her wing-nut optician, who voted for Trump, loves guns, and is a loudmouthed prick. “I fucking hate him,” Silverman tells the camera. “He's an asshole.”

The time she spent with the Trump-voting family in Louisiana is heartwarming, but it's also almost too easy, like a stunt. This sketch is different. There's a banal utility to it that makes it more illuminating than the others, because both Silverman and her optician clearly have no hope of reconciliation. But they also recognize that they can do business together DESPITE that hate, that there-ness. It's a localized, functioning hatred, one both parties can tolerate even when they cannot tolerate each other. And it is perhaps a better sign of how to move forward as a country than hoping we can connect on a more personal level.

“The night Trump won, he texted me so much,” she tells me.

He texts? Your optician just texts you his takes out of the blue?

“Because he had my number from the first time I went there, and he had to text me when my glasses were ready.… He texted me so much that night, like, ‘In your face.’ He calls me ‘babe.’ It's so gross. I've never responded. I just deleted it. [But] even at the end, I go like, I fucking hate his guts, but if he were really sick, would I bring him soup? I probably would, or I'd have someone bring it.”

And he makes good glasses.

“The best.”

If Silverman ever had a, dare we say, trolly side, there's no evidence of it in this apartment. She is working her empathetic magic on my calcified soul, convincing me that her way of dealing with people is the right way to go about it. Also, she gave me a beer and didn't rag on me for getting ambushed by her toilet. Instead, she reassured me with a suggestion for handling the toilet that also serves as a kind of universal Zen koan: “You just be strong with it.”

She is also, and this is important, funnier than she's ever been. Her most recent stand-up special, A Speck of Dust, recorded after she survived a near-death tango with the suitably comedic ailment of epiglottitis, is both filthy and impeccable. You will not miss the distinct lack of N-word jokes, because you'll be too busy laughing at her three-minute jag on laser pubic-hair removal. Onstage, she illuminates and mocks the real ignorance that once informed her fake-ignorant comic persona, and it works perfectly. She has become an indisputably better, smarter comedian for it. Silverman is pragmatic about how much real good she can do on her own, but comedy remains both her life's work and her most effective means of getting people to take the stick out of their ass.

“If we can leave people with just their defenses down,” she tells me, “not because we're going to attack them, but just be a little bit more open, I feel like that's a good thing. Is that going to change the world? Maybe just a little bit.”

And much as I used to enjoy the old incarnation of Silverman, I know that's not necessarily the comedian America needs right now. We haven't exactly gotten far with the Stewarts and Olivers of the world EVISCERATING Republican horseshit. Maybe rhetorical war is just as worthless as the real deal. Maybe America needs someone willing to extend a hand when another person is in pain, or perhaps when they've shit themselves.

When I get home from L.A., I check my mentions and I see a random dude on Twitter call me “cunt.” Now, tell me that isn't serendipitous. I stare at that tweet for a few seconds, an eternity in Internet time. And I think about how Silverman responded when she got a surprise “CUNT” in her mentions. She handled it with class. She turned an ugly comment into a beautiful relationship. So I ask myself, What would Sarah do with this guy? I think about replying, Hey, man, sorry you feel that way. I think about converting a troll of my own.

But I don't. I don't because I don't have the guts to reach out, and because honestly, fuck that guy. I'm not strong with it, and maybe only Silverman is. Maybe she remains the anomaly: the quiet Minotaur, residing alone in that sweet spot between viciousness and gentleness, between comedy and compassion.

Drew Magary is a GQ correspondent.

This story originally appeared in the June 2018 issue with the title "Sarah Silverman Is the Troll Slayer."