Someone You Love

Sarah Silverman spent much of the early 2020s hosting a podcast where she discussed politics and social justice with a newly urgent, sometimes earnest tone. Her 2023 special serves as a reminder that she is still, at her core, a comedian who loves scatological punchlines and sudden pivots into bad taste. She openly addresses this contradiction, joking about how her boyfriend called her out for demanding allyship online while simultaneously telling audiences that Jews have diarrhea. It is a self-deprecating thesis that culminates in her reading a Hawaiian hotel’s pool rule banning guests with active digestive issues, which she immediately decodes as a polite way of saying \”No Jews allowed.\”\n\nFilmed at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, the hour is Silverman’s first HBO special since 2013’s We Are Miracles. She had spent the preceding year in a different lane, writing and staging her off-Broadway musical The Bedwetter. Here, she returns to the microphone with a loose, highly personal hour that starts with a filmed skit of children wishing her luck—culminating in a young boy dressed as an Orthodox Jew declaring she is a disgrace to her people. From there, she riffs on tone policing, aging, and the branding failure of prunes before closing the show with a deceptively sweet acoustic song about a partner’s atrocious breath. The hour was well-received by critics, winning a Writers Guild Award and pulling in nominations for both a Grammy and a Golden Globe.