Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic - Austin American-Statesman movie review

There's scant 'Magic' in Sarah Silverman's filmed comedy act

By CHRIS GARCIA
Austin American-Statesman

A mediocre comedian is worse than a bad comedian. A bad comedian at least makes you feel something — deflation, frustration, pity — with delivery that splutters and jokes that splatter. Rottenness exerts its own fascination. Like camp — or Louie Anderson — it can be so bad it's good.

Mediocrity, on the other hand, wears on you. It bores with its blah, sapping energy as it erodes your will to live. Stultification sets in like rigor mortis. In a dying gasp, you bleat out Carrot Top's name.

Roadside Attractions

'Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic'

2 out of 5 stars

Director: Liam Lynch
Starring: Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Posehn, Laura Silverman, La'vin Kiyano
Run time: 72 minutes
Release date: Nov. 11, 2005
Rating: Not rated; contains extremely graphic profanity and sexual talk.
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Backstage with Silverman
Film critic Hap Erstein explores a stand-up comedian who never pulls her punches.

On the web
Official movie site

Sarah Silverman is a mediocre comedian. She has some funny zingers (I like the bit about starving African children), all of them tart and mean, yet she doesn't have a cohesive act as much as a bad-girl persona and trucker's vocabulary that she flings with aimless disregard.

On stage, as seen in her new concert movie "Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic," the comic stands fixed at the microphone, using lanky arms and fussy facial expressions to embroider an intentionally flat delivery meant to convey the glib noncommitment of ironic youth. What it really does is underscore the one-dimensionality of her material, reducing lines to brittle throwaways. Instead of worked-over material, actual comic writing laced with shrewd observations, she spits globules of bile that evaporate on contact.

A writer and sometime-movie actor ("School of Rock"), Silverman has become a minor pop figure, thanks to her media-genic image as a biting beauty willing to say anything. She looks for laughs in all the raw places. Rape, AIDS, the Holocaust, sexual perversity, racial stereotypes — her victims are large, and obvious.

Lithe with pale skin and hair as shiny-black as Liz Taylor's in "Cleopatra," Silverman is indeed a looker. Yet she deflects ogling with a tomboy aggression and scratchy bray she wields like a jagged blade. Add her Seabiscuit teeth and you get shades of Melissa Rivers. "I don't care if you think I'm racist, as long as you think I'm thin," she cracks.

At 72 minutes, "Jesus is Magic" has just enough time to show the comic's rhythmless standup — all stop-start blurts amid lots of space — with forays into lame sketch comedy and embarrassing music videos. (Beware the comedian who writes funny "ditties." Recall Gallagher. He was good like that.)

The film's title comes from a bit about Silverman being Jewish and her boyfriend, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, being Christian. "He believes Jesus is magic," she says. "(Jesus) turned water into wine. I think he made the Statue of Liberty disappear."

Her forked tongue is for jabbing sacred cows. On the lionization of Martin Luther King, she gripes, "People only talk about the good things. They don't say he was a litterbug." (These are far from her best jokes, which are not fit to print.)

Having cameras at her show tells you something Silverman probably didn't intend: She never kills. Crowd shots show laughter, but often half the house is merely smiling or dourly unmoved. The awkward standby line "Thank you for laughing at that," which Silverman uses, is not the retort of a polished performer.

People call Silverman fearless, but her smirk and studied detachment are the hip ironist's armor, and the mark of cowardice. Her material is too shallow and solipsistic to transcend what it is: juvenile provocations from a young woman reveling in her brassiness.

Comparisons to Lenny Bruce ring like PR boilerplate. Silverman's rabid political-incorrectness doesn't approach social commentary because she is not an astute observer of the world and what some of us call real life. While she's deft with an acid quip or vulgar insult, she hasn't created an actual work, despite padding the show with sophomoric songs. Cute, as she must know, goes only so far.