by MATTHEW HAYS

“I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis and all of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m turning into my mother.’”

That’s a mild taster of what you can expect from Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic, a one-woman show that features the caustic JAP joking about everything from AIDS to the ever-hilarious Holocaust—and that’s when she’s playing it safe. She doesn’t start really taking risks till she fires off a couple of race-baiting wisecracks and a few of her infamous rape gags. How does she get away with it? One: she has a cunning way of upending stereotypes, and two: she’s a babe (or at least easier on the eyes than, say, Bobcat Goldthwait).

This wicked combination makes Silverman somewhat of an anomaly on the comedy circuit. After all, there are few, if any, comedians out there who can boast a suh-weet rack and foul mouth. Yet, many people only know the former SNL player as either The Aristocrats scene-stealer or Jimmy Kimmel’s girlfriend. So it’s about bloody time she made her own movie. It’s just too bad she felt compelled to pad her concert footage with a loose plot and some sing-song sketches. With observations like, “Strippers should be role models for little girls if only for the fact that they wax their assholes,” we don’t need any spoofed music videos. We just want more of Silverman’s cutting wit.

In a recent e-mail interview with the Mirror (Silverman hammered out her answers while flying home from the Super Bowl debauchery in Detroit), she is somewhat aloof about why she chose to incorporate these extraneous skits into Jesus Is Magic, saying merely that she “thought it would be cool.” Conversely, on matters such as pissing off the American Asian community (or at least one of its members), sharing material with Kimmel and the possibility of show-biz legend Joe Franklin taking her to court, she was refreshingly forthcoming.

Cracks about blacks

Long before landing supporting roles in films like The School of Rock and There’s Something About Mary, Silverman knew she was destined to be a comedian.

“It’s like being gay or something,” says the coltish beauty, who started working the club circuits at age 17. “It’s just what I am. Like being a Sagittarius or something, I guess.”

Making people laugh out loud may have been a birthright, but what kind of sharp insights could a 12th-grader possibly have in her joke arsenal?

“I pretty much just talked about whatever I was obsessing about at the time,” she says. “When I first started I talked about high school, then drugs, then sex and then wider and wider (and sometimes narrower) topics as my experience and perspective changed.”

Today, she focuses a fair bit of her social commentary on African Americans. Some of her funniest lines in Jesus Is Magic are ghetto digs. To wit: “The best time to get pregnant is when you’re a black teenager.” And what exactly prompted this skinny white chick to try and pull off racially sensitive humour?

“Black people. No—just being a part of the world and finding stuff funny above all things.”

However, she does admit during her routine that she only has the balls to make fun of people she’s not scared of. (Note: there are no Muslim impersonations in Jesus Is Magic.)

No comparisons

Speaking of Muslims, let’s move on to that Allah-loving Dave Chappelle. The former Comedy Central star has been known to tell audience members to fuck off if they make any requests for his “I’m Rick James, bitch” shtick. When asked if she’s ever had to flip the bird to one of her admirers during a live show, Silverman had this to say: “Luckily, no. I’ve acquired no catch phrases or anything audiences tend to demand to satiate their need for the familiar. Although I’m considering, ‘Hey! That’s my tomato!’”

Sounds like a keeper. With gems like that at the ready (okay “gems” is a bit of a stretch), surely she must censor herself during pillow talk to ensure Kimmel doesn’t poach some of these one-liners for his opening monologues, yes?

“No. He doesn’t need my material,” she insists. “He’s a walking joke machine. He’s a comic genius. You can see it on his show, but keep in mind you are seeing the Disney version (ABC).”

Spoken like a woman in love.

As mentioned before, currently there aren’t any corresponding female acts, so most critics wind up comparing Silverman to Jewish American satirist Lenny Bruce.

“It’s very flattering,” she says, “but I can’t just pretend it’s more valid than the very unflattering comparisons and pans I get too. I think the whole thing can be identity-crisis-inducing if you let yourself really think about it or give it too much credence.”

Irking Asians

One person’s opinion she does pay mind to in Jesus Is Magic is Guy Aoki. He’s the member of Media Action Network for Asian Americans who took great offence to Silverman’s use of the word “chink” on Conan O’Brien’s show back in 2001. Of course, in the full context of the joke, it’s not nearly as offensive as it sounds. Aoki doesn’t see it that way, unfortunately, and has consequently waged a defamation war against Silverman.

“That stuff has much less to do with what he is policing and much more to do with his personal life,” says Silverman, taking an uncharacteristically philosophical approach to the question. “We all hear and see things from the point of view of our own life and experience. Guys like him are really about proving something to their father, or trying to have control over something in a life where they have none, or—the possibilities go on and on, but the common denominator is that it’s really about the personal.”

Aoki is not the only one who has been personally offended by Silverman’s brand of humour. As anyone who has seen The Aristocrats will remember, Silverman looked straight into the camera and with a deadpan delivery said, “Joe Franklin raped me.”

“I think it came out great,” she says. “I had no recollection of what I had said because it was literally a 10-minute improv during a 15-minute visit by Penn and Paul in 2001.”

While she gained a lot of fans with the brief but memorable appearance, Franklin was not impressed and allegedly paid a visit to his lawyers over the matter. So far nothing but rumoured legal threats have come out of it, so Silverman, who knows there’s no such thing as bad press, isn’t too worried.

“There’s no way he’ll really sue,” she says, “but if he does he should do it now while the DVD is out.”

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic opens
at the Cinéma du Parc Friday, Feb. 17

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