Provocative social commentary is the order of the day with this US comedian
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (15)
dir: Liam Lynch
Sarah Silverman is a 37-year-old stand-up comic who makes you understand why the end of a joke is called the punchline. Her gags hurt. They are rendered more subversive by her sing-song, butter-wouldn't-melt delivery. She is nasty under cover of niceness, with neither quality cancelling out the other. She's like a perfume bottle filled with acid, or a skipping rope that you realise too late is made of barbed wire.
In the US, she can be depended upon to cause scandal and distress whenever she opens her trap. High-profile offendees have included Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. ("Have you seen Britney's kids?" Silverman asked at the MTV Awards. "Oh my God, they are the most adorable mistakes you will ever see! They're as cute as the hairless vagina they came out of.")
Her biggest controversy arose after she told a story about trying to wriggle out of jury service: "My friend said, 'Why don't you write something really inappropriate on the form, like 'I hate Chinks'? I was, like, 'Yeah!' But I don't want people to think that I'm racist, I just wanna get out of jury duty. So I filled out the form and I wrote: 'I love Chinks.' And who doesn't?"
This is a sophisticated dissection of racism - her pet topic - so it is hardly surprising that Silverman was pilloried by the media. But her persona relies on the barbs being aimed both outwards and inwards; she is simultaneously porcupine and iron maiden, as she demonstrated in her response to the furore over that gag. "My name was in all the papers as a racist," she says in her concert film Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. "And that hurt as a member of the Jewish community. I was really concerned that we were losing our control of the media."
The picture is only just opening in the UK nearly three years after its US release, which means some of her sharpest new material is excluded, such as her observations on the similarities between elderly Jewish people and African-American homeboys: "They both love their sneakers very white . . . All their friends are dying . . ."
Most disappointingly, Jesus is Magic is poorly organised, with the flow of Silverman's stand-up routine interrupted by random sketches and cutaways to the audience busting a gut. But a film-maker would have had to leave the lens cap on and the sound off not to capture some of this comic's malicious mock-sincerity, or her gloss of self-absorption.
"The person I am onstage is me," she once explained, "but there's a kind of ignorance coupled with arrogance, and I see that reflected in our country." Her ability to serve back to liberal audiences their own buried prejudice and paranoia dressed up as civilised chit-chat is classic release-valve comedy, addressing society's fears and foibles by amplifying them. All right, so her musical numbers aren't exactly laugh-riots. But when have you ever heard a decent comedy song? They always drag on for months and turn any performer into Richard Stilgoe.
The strongest material in Jesus is Magic uses taboo humour to pinpoint everyday cruelty. Her idea for putting a positive spin on the events of 9/11 - "American Airlines: first through the towers" is her suggestion for a new ad campaign - would be ghoulish if it didn't pale beside the exploitative language of normal political discourse. In a world in which John McCain's adviser Charlie Black can remark that his boss would benefit from another terrorist attack on US soil, and an age in which Stephen Byers and Jo Moore can find a bureaucratic silver lining to 9/11, Silverman's routine seems like a temperate response to ordinary madness. (One gag ends, for reasons too convoluted to explain here, with her praying: "Oh God, please let them find semen in my dead grandmother's vagina" - a line that I swear cropped up straight-faced on a recent episode of Waking the Dead.)
To be offended by any of this would be to miss the point. In fact, the only minority group that would have legitimate cause to take umbrage at Jesus is Magic, as far as I can see, would be the physically disabled. Quite unforgivably, Silverman fails to crack a single joke about them.
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