Comedienne Silverman enacts our racist id.
If you managed to sit through
The Aristocrats
, you must have noticed there were regrettably few women comics to attempt the infamously perverted title joke. Offhand, we remember only three: Whoopi Goldberg, Phyllis Diller and a young woman whose version was only slightly, and we mean
slightly
, less graphically revolting than Bob Saget's. Her dark-eyed prettiness, combined with her nerveless delivery
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and the fact that she made herself one of the joke's traumatized victims, was unexpectedly, horrifically hilarious; and we scanned the credits for her name, thinking we'd love to see more of Ms. Silverman.
If only
Jesus Is Magic
gave us more of a chance to do so. Her show's rather too short to fill an entire feature film, a difficulty with many stand-up routines (though not the best-probably they have to force Robin Williams or Eddie Izzard to
stop
after an hour and a half), so a perfectly serviceable concert performance gets thinned out with lumpy fantasy-sequence musical numbers-which segments, to be honest, play suspiciously like a sitcom audition casting reel. Over the course of the hour we're nonetheless treated to enough of her trademark potty-mouth that most viewers probably experience a surfeit pretty quickly. Still, she's genuinely funny, and one can only wish her director had given her less rope and kept her a bit more on task.
Over the course of the evening Silverman visibly settles into her persona and only really hits her stride in the last 20 minutes of the show (eye-roll-inducing interludes aside). Her character self, which plays on the stereotype of the ditsy, self-centered Jewish girl, treats everything as an occasion for us to receive her wisdom on the subject, like an inebriated Miss New Jersey finalist, early Rachel Geller or Jessica Simpson in her heyday
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of confusion over canned goods. Silverman has created a subtly subversive vehicle whose dingy sententiousness somehow lets her get away with saying the unthinkable out loud-usually. In one of the high points, she recounts her publicized collision with activist Guy Aoki, upset because she told a joke using the epithet "Chink": "He accused me of being racist and I felt hurt-I did. I mean, as a member of the Jewish community, I was really concerned…that we were losing control of the media!" She pauses, blinking in confusion while the audience laughs uneasily. "I mean, what kind of a world do we live in…where a
totally
cute white girl can't say 'Chink' on network television?! You have to be able to laugh at yourself-that's what I tell Asian people all the time. But they don't listen…" she trails off in theatrical resignation, her voice quavery with self-pity.
Silverman's spiel tends to such apparently sophomoric conclusions as, "You live and you learn and hopefully you grow"-conclusions transformed into indecently sly bolts of irony when they follow statements of "fact" like, "The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager," or, of African famine victims: "Of course I don't give them
money
, because I don't want them to spend it on drugs!" She's also given to the non sequitur ("You know who has a really tiny vagina? Barbie…") and suspiciously staunch championing of strange causes ("I do not think there are enough Jewish women in porn").
Jesus Is Magic
isn't enough of a show to assume its place with offensive stand-up classics like, say,
Raw
, or
Live on the Sunset Strip
; but Silverman points girlishly and unerringly at the exposed nerves of our least-admitted class and cultural tensions, and we hope she'll be encouraged to keep gleefully probing.
