Sarah Silverman’s 2017 special A Speck of Dust contained perhaps the single greatest misdirect I have ever seen in stand-up. The joke involved her sister (‘I have three, and I am not going to tell you which one’) in college, living in a co-ed dorm at Boston University. One night, her sister was very drunk and sleeping it off in a t-shirt and underwear. “A few minutes later, the room started spinning, and she ran to the bathroom and she started throwing up,” Silverman says. “And while she’s vomiting, she can feel that somebody is tugging her underwear down.”

“She couldn’t turn around or stop it because she was throwing up so hard,” Silverman continues. “She’s vomiting and vomiting, and they’re tugging her underwear down. It’s going all the way down to the ground. And she finally finishes throwing up, and she whips her head around to see who’s there. But she didn’t see anybody. Because she had been shitting herself.”

The reason I love this joke and Silverman’s comedy, in general, is simple — few comedians have the technique or the onstage presence to pull off an outrageously risky joke like this one, which plays with audience expectations masterfully, the punch line pulling the rug beneath their feet. Her latest special Someone You Love premiered on HBO on 27 May and it sees the 52-year-old comedian on top of her game. There are jokes about ageing, organised religion, the politics of tone policing, antisemitism, maintaining old friendships as one grows older—and much else besides. But the real strength of the show is the way Silverman talks about internalised bias, about confronting and correcting one’s own prejudices.

But the real strength of the show is the way Silverman talks about internalised bias, about confronting and correcting one’s own prejudices.

Like the routine where Silverman talks about her best friend Heidi telling her that while she does not mind being called ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’, she identifies as ‘queer’, which is a reclaimed word. ‘Queer’ was pretty much a slur in the 1970s and 80s in America, especially in the Boston region where Silverman grew up.

“I don’t know if it’s growing up in New England, or growing up in the 80s or some kind of combination of both, but homophobia was so deeply embedded in us,” Silverman recalls. “We didn’t even notice it. We played a game on the playground called ‘Smear the Queer’. Even the teachers didn’t notice it, they’d be like, ‘If you’re gonna play Smear the Queer go do it on the other wall, people are taking the PSATs here!’”

The same friend, Heidi, is at the centre of another joke — another diarrhoea joke, as it turns out. Silverman’s fond of jokes involving bodily fluids (in this show alone, there are a few about diarrhoea and one involving semen). So when Heidi cannot figure out why she’s suffering from diarrhoea, Silverman ‘cracks the case’ by discovering a giant half-eaten bag of prunes in her backpack. Prunes are famously used as a digestive aid by constipated senior citizens, only Heidi thought she was eating “dried plums”, because that’s what the packaging said.

Silverman says: “Big Prune was probably like ‘We need to rebrand. We’re the shit fruit.’ I get it, it’s smart, I’d love to be in that pitch meeting. ‘Pete, what do you got?’ ‘Uh… Texas raisins?’ ‘Pamela, what do you have?’ ‘Um… bathtub toes?’ But of course, they went with ‘dried plums’. They should come with a warning. ‘Warning: These are prunes, though!’”

Her observation about prunes being widely perceived as ‘the shit fruit’ is both very funny and 100% accurate. In the well-known police procedural series Castle, an episode called Under the Gun (S03E03) sees officers Ryan and Esposito (two of the show’s cop-protagonists) losing an 80-year-old suspect after an unsuccessful chase sequence on foot. The two cops are then ‘gifted’ bottles of prune juice by their colleagues, alongside dentures and adult diapers.

Silverman has been releasing mostly podcast episodes for the last few years, with little to no comedy work. These episodes discuss her personal life, red-button issues in comedy and a lot of other, disparate topics. On this eponymous podcast, she has struck a much more sombre and serious tone, one you would not expect if you’ve watched her only in comedic contexts. But in truth, this journalism-adjacent work is at one with her comedic style, which depends on leading the audience down a sombre, serious path (like the rape-joke-to-toilet-humour routine described at the beginning of this article) — and then skewering their expectations, shocking them with punch lines that go hard. Like her Elon Musk joke, which might just be my single favourite moment from Someone You Love.

“I would never buy a German car and my parents before me never bought a German car because we don’t want to give our money to Nazis. Except I just bought a German car, but only because they’re so good, you know? Plus, I feel like all the original Nazis are dead now. And sure, there are new Nazis but they don’t know how to make a car!”

If you’ve somehow never seen Silverman performing (she has been in the business for 25+ years now), Someone You Love is an excellent place to start. And if you are familiar with her work, I can confirm that you’re in for a really good time.