Sarah Silverman is part-responsible for every single detention I’ve ever had, every ticking off from a boss, every awkward silence at a first meeting. This is because as a teenager, I gleaned from watching YouTube clips of her standup that saying the unsayable was ok; as long as it is smart and funny enough (and that this applies even if you are a woman – thanks, too, to Joan Rivers for this formative lesson).

Those clips were from her 2005 standup show-cum-film, Jesus is Magic, which introduced a mass audience to Silverman’s pseudo-sweet charm while delivering outre lines – a well-worn butter-wouldn’t-melt tactic employed even by cheeky five-year-old nieces, but which Silverman nailed.

Her comedy has always been bone-close: jokes about September 11; child poverty in Africa; AIDs; a skit in which she she sang a song called You’re Gonna Die Soon to care home residents. Some past gags verge on uncomfortable (“when Mexicans tell me off and say that they don’t smell, I have to try to explain to them – you can’t smell yourself”), but she has also always taken aim at her own culture and Jewish heritage (“I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”) It’s something she continues in A Speck of Dust, mocking herself as a typical “liberal Democrat Jew”.

A Speck of Dust, road-tested nationwide and now on Netflix, is informed mostly by two things: her near-death experience from an abscess in her throat and the deaths of three close people, (including her mother and her comedy mentor Garry Shandling); plus the Trumpian, febrile political atmosphere and ideologically divided world we find ourselves in. The themes here are bigger, then, than Jesus is Magic, or The Sarah Silverman Program, or the flimsy acting roles she’s taken. Silverman still does goofy voices (she’s one of the few comics whose delivery alone could save a subpar joke) and there are still cracks about dicks – but staring down death is sure to alter one’s perception on the world, as is living in a country the order of which suddenly seems upended (we can vouch for that in the UK).



Silverman said recently that not speaking out politically is to be complicit. And there’s a lot of material here on the worrying changes in America, without once mentioning You Know Who by name. Silverman has one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard – political commentators included – of how rights are removed by attrition. No, she says, Roe v Wade won’t be overturned outright, but by insidious amendments abortions will be made impossible. How do you shut an abortion clinic down? Legislate that all clinics have to have eight-foot wide corridors, knowing that it is impossible for some buildings to afford or make that change.

But more than just expose these divides, Silverman tells of her attempt to bridge them. She recounts an experience of engaging with Westboro Baptist Church protestors. It doesn’t entirely go to plan when an eight-year-old tells her “you’re gonna burn in hell” for being pro-choice.

Silverman’s sisters, one of whom has worked with her, have featured in past sets, but in A Speck of Dust she speaks a lot about her father and his influence on her, as well as her boyfriend, the actor Michael Sheen. One of the best segments, which combines the personal and the political, is a tale of her time in hospital. She tells of how, given a general anaesthetic, she proves she is not sufficiently sedated by giving an astute and coherent analysis of Brexit, and in one of my favourite bits of the show she says of Sheen: “Just as I was being wheeled into theatre, I said to him: ‘I wanna see other people’.” (Footage of the Brexit analysis, by the way, plays over the end credits.)

A Speck of Dust is just the latest in Netflix’s coup of feature-length comedy sets, including recent efforts from Louis CK – which represented a return to form – and the rather hit-and-miss effort from Dave Chappelle. Both of those arrived in the last two months. For Silverman’s part she said the decision to do her show on Netflix was more fortuitous timing than anything else, but it seems as though this is the future of at-home comedy distribution, rather than the DVD releases in the Christmas stocking model of the past.

There’s the occasional joke that doesn’t land, but they are few, and multiple laugh-out-loud lines. There are meta-jokes Silverman makes about the structure of comedy itself, as if turning her gags inside out and showing you the seams, which comedy nerds will certainly enjoy. It’s a joyful hour with a comedian who has been missed on the stage. I don’t wanna see other people.

Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust is on Netflix now.