December 7th: "Sara Silverman: Jesus Is Magic"

I tend to walk out of stand-up comedy concert movies before they're over since they lack a plot to get me to stick around to find out what happens. But this one is only 70 minutes long, which is plenty for one comedian.

Overall: not bad.

Silverman is a good-looking lady, not exactly a beauty, but she has a nice healthy this-will-be-the-mother-of-my-children look about her, combined with a famously filthy mouth. (Generally, nubile women with dirty mouths are so horrifying-fascinating to people that the public can't tell the talented, like guitarist Liz Phair, from the lame, like the "Sex in the City" coven.)

Silverman's shtick is reminiscent of Wendy Liebman, who perfected a style where she threw away the real punchline almost under her breath:

"My mother is a ventriloquist – but not professionally. For ten years I thought the dog was telling me to kill my father." [ Waiting a beat, she adds quietly.] "I got my brother to do it."

Silverman isn't as mechanical in the format of her jokes as Liebman, but she goes for the delayed reaction detonations too:

When I was in high school, I dated my father's best friend. Now that I think back on it, it was really creepy. [Shaking her head over it.] My father having a 14-year-old best friend ...

Silverman does some race-based humor. Her persona is that she's too narcissistic to know or care that you aren't supposed to say that:

“I don’t care if you think I’m racist. I just want you to think I’m thin.”

Her best bit might be:

I got in trouble for saying the word “Ch*nk” on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media.

Unfortunately, occasionally she throws in an intentionally stupid, untrue racial stereotype ("Mexicans smell bad") so all the nice white liberals in the audience can pretend her other stereotypes ("Asians are good at math") are dumb too.

Her persona as the Evil Innocent is a good one, but she could punch up her jokes a little. Like when she goes on at some length about how weird it is that lots of Jews buy German cars, she could add:

Instead of Mercedes, they should buy Japanese cars like the Lexus. After all, what did the Japanese ever do to anyone?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer