Sarah Silverman’s new Netflix special ‘PortMortem’ tackles Jewish grief and masturbation
Silverman’s new special about the death of her parents continues the Jewish tradition of laughing through grief
Sarah Silverman in 2018. Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
By Olivia Haynie May 21, 2025
Not many people would open a tribute to their dead parents with a hand job joke. But it makes sense that the person who would — and pulls it off pretty tastefully — is Sarah Silverman.
Her new Netflix comedy special PostMortem was inspired by the fact that her father and stepmother passing away ten days apart from each other in 2023. As much of a eulogy as it is a classic standup routine, Silverman’s show captures the strong personalities of her deceased parents — her humorous, chutzpah-filled dad Donald, also known as “Schleppy” and her bleach-blonde, rule-following step-mother Janice. She also dedicates some time to her grammatically strict mother, Beth Ann, an actress who passed away in 2015.
The special is full of references to her Jewish heritage, with jokes about retail, older Jewish women’s affinity for leopard prints, and spending winters in Florida. Silverman seamlessly blends heartwarming anecdotes about her parents with jokes about enacting a summer camp sex fantasy with her boyfriend — a form of role play that has a particularly Jewish edge to it.
She discusses her dad’s wishes to be buried in a plain pine coffin in accordance with Jewish tradition. However, upon discovering her dad would be dying so soon after his wife, Silverman — in a look she acknowledges as “bad for the Jews” — snagged a “plus one” deal on the burial, where she could get them buried together for the price of one plot.
The catch: Her dad would need to be cremated to fit into the plot, which is generally seen as unacceptable in the Jewish tradition. When she told him, he responded with the characteristic curtness of an old Jewish man called Schleppy: “I don’t give a f—. I’ll be dead.”
Even in the moments that aren’t explicitly Jewish, Jewish values feel present. Silverman notes that the version of her father she misses most is not his young, able-bodied self but the feebler man who she had to help take care of. She fondly recounts “feeling honored” to clean him every day after he became unable to do it himself.
The cleansing of the body is a practice of continued importance throughout the Jewish life cycle. The mikveh, or ritual bath, is used for a number of purposes, including marital purity, as part of the conversion process, and as a form of mental cleansing for victims of trauma. Before a dead body is buried, it is purified in an act of ritual washing called tahara. In Judaism, the act of cleaning a body is not just an act of physical care, but a spiritual one, and it makes sense that Silverman would have felt honored to give this gift to her father.
Silverman does not shy away from the heartbreak of losing one’s parents, acknowledging that the ache never goes away. But she also shares a lesson from her therapist, that even after our loved ones die, their spirit remains with us at all times.
For Silverman, who refers to herself multiple times throughout the special as “godless,” this message aligns with her faith in science and belief that “energy cannot be created or destroyed.”
“Our loved ones, they’re not in the ground or in their bodies anymore,” Silverman tells her audience. “But their energy, their essence, their ‘-ness,’ is out there, and I actually think that our loved ones are watching over us.”
She makes sure to clarify she doesn’t think we are constantly being watched by the deceased — just primarily when we are masturbating.
