Fearless stand-up never pulls her punches

For a nice Jewish girl with parents who winter in Boca Raton, Sarah Silverman has a real potty mouth. But she looks so demure that she can get away with the things she says onstage.

"I hate breaking down and dissecting my own work, but that said, I would assume there is some sort of appeal in the contrast of the sweetness of the image and the material," she says at the Toronto International Film Festival, where her profane, something-to-offend-everyone concert film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, first met an audience. "It's what makes it palatable for people."

Born in New Hampshire 35 years ago, Silverman learned her craft in New York comedy clubs before graduating to the writing staff of Saturday Night Live. She appeared briefly in such comic films as There's Something About Mary and School of Rock, before becoming a standout in last year's The Aristocrats, about telling the world's dirtiest joke.

"I would never guess that this was the thing that kind of gave that extra push for me," shrugs Silverman. "But I'm so glad it's out there." Like most of the comedians in the film, she did it as a lark, knowing that no one would ever release such a film in theaters.

"I was so lewd," she recalls with a laugh. "You're always at your best when you don't care. And you're so much better when you're doing it for your friends, you know what I mean? That's what that was."

As Whoopi Goldberg notes in The Aristocrats, it is harder for women to be accepted doing off-color material than men. Silverman is not sure that is true since, "I've only ever been a woman, you know?," but she likens the problem to that of female boxers. "You know how it's hard to watch women boxers? You want to go, 'Hey, women can box,' but there is some human instinct where it's hard to watch women get the (excrement) kicked out of them, even by another woman. There is probably an element of that in stand-up comedy."

Over the course of several years, Silverman amassed enough comic material for an evening's show, Jesus is Magic. "I did the show in like four different runs — added songs, cut songs, added jokes, cut chunks of jokes. And then a little over a year ago, we shot it," she says with pride.

Fearlessly, Silverman salted her act with comic material about such subjects as the Holocaust, ethnic stereotypes and even the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It was months after the event that she felt comfortable approaching the last topic. "I couldn't even do stand-up for weeks, because I felt so false not talking about it and I certainly couldn't find anything funny about it," she says. "If you avoid it, it's this big elephant in the room. I just think it's kind of like personal velocity, everyone's ready at different times. If it's funny enough, you can get away with it."

With scattershot jokes targeted at such groups as blacks, Asians and Nazis, you would think they would be unlikely audience members for Silverman. "I don't think that's true. I'm very big in the Nazi community," she quips. "Listen, I get predominantly white crowds, but way more mixed than a lot of white comics."

Besides, Silverman sees a definite link between Jewish and black comedians. "The people who are most depressed in history — Jews with the Holocaust, black people with slavery and all their years of oppression — they probably make up the majority of stand-up comedians," she notes. "It's just about finding the humor in sad things, but it really is human nature."