At some point last year, after the Women’s March but before the first sales of Fire and Fury, it stopped being cutting-edge and cool simply to hate our political opponents. The almost always edgy actress, comedian, and avowed liberal Sarah Silverman figured this out early, maybe even first: She found the new edge, and it was niceness.
Last January, she broke the rules of internet engagement to befriend a commenter who’d called her a c*** in response to one of her Tweets: Instead of blocking him or responding in kind, she looked through his timeline and found—amidst slurs and outbursts—a complaint about back pain. She wrote back, “I see your rage is thinly veiled pain,” and “I know this feeling.” They’ve been corresponding ever since; he says her help has changed him.
Far as her fans can tell, Silverman’s transformed too. Her current project, streaming travelogue talk show I Love You, America, seems on the surface to be a departure from her old style of toying with taboos. It first aired on Hulu in the fall of 2017, was just renewed for a second season, and at its core, is about being good to people whose politics she finds repugnant. She interviews Trump voters: a sweet and funny family of Louisiana crab fishermen displaced by Katrina, whose 9-year-old son she makes the star of the first episode; a whole fire department and a hair stylist in Texas, whose scatological confessions (“Tell me, have you ever shit your pants?”) overcome the cultural divide; and her annoying eye doctor in Los Angeles, among others.
She brings in members of her own family: her father as a funny foil to the Texans and then her sister, a rabbi, to talk about God and sexism. In a more traditional talk show format, she interviews activists on the frontlines like Jesuit priest Gregory J. Boyle, who ministers to gang members. He explains his doctrine of “radical kinship,” the act of loving and serving those who reject you—which she paraphrases in what sounds like a pithy new thesis for the show’s mission: “We’ve got to include the excluders.”
Every episode opens with a theme-song-monologue sequence, really just an ode to America: “You know, sometimes I get really, really mad at you and the stupid shit that you do,” Silverman says. “How you vote for these rich f**** that lie to your faces… And you’re mad at me for wanting the best for you and getting pissed when you vote against your best interest? I’m caring about you, I’m condescending to you.” On that uncommonly honest note, she pauses as though a spark of self-awareness kicked off her journey into the dreaded heartland.
In a recent GQ interview with Drew Magary, Silverman unpacks her motives. “We’re way more alike than we think,” she says. “We’re just getting our facts from different news sources.” She also reveals she regrets much of the shocking racial and sexual humor that made her famous in the late 1990s and early 2000s: “I’m horrified by it,” she says of a sketch she did in blackface on her old show, The Sarah Silverman Program. But she still has plenty to say that will offend some. She’s talked to her friends Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, and Al Franken since their respective #MeToo reckonings, she reveals in the interview. And she doesn’t see why these men should have to stop working: “The important thing is that they’re forever changed.”
Magary, writing about Silverman’s role as a “troll slayer” in the Resistance, remains skeptical of what she’s doing. He considers how she’s changed, how she’s softened in some ways since she was a young stand-up. Back then, a proto-troll herself, she drew ire from an Asian-American activist for using “chink” as a milder last-minute substitute for the n-word in a riff on taboos. She’s condemned the edgiest of her old material—“All I can say is I’m not that person anymore”—and now navigates the minefield of identity politics more to prove there’s something good on the other side than to set off as many bombs as possible. What Silverman’s doing now isn’t at all soft. In all its earnestness, it’s edgier than the old stuff.
Though the focus and format are different, she’s still torturing orthodoxies. Meeting people who expect loathing and condescension from coastal liberals—meeting them with love, laughing with them, and taking them seriously—all seems way more radical in 2018 than any of the jokes that first made her famous. The transfixing strangeness of common decency directed toward the other side proves we’ve got a lot of work to do. And, weirdly, there may be no better than brash and silly Silverman, who’s built a career on the absurd and unconventional, to lead us onward.
