Sarah Silverman is clever, hilarious and sucker-punches you with unanticipated reversals. She's one of the most skillful current young comics at prickly and violating humor that cuts through the watered-down amateurism of so many modern male comedians who kill their own timing with a rock-star façade and stadium atmosphere. Silverman is tall, brunette and certainly attractive, and she says outrageous things with the clear-cut diction and self-assurance of a girl who was raised knowing how to make a good impression. The detach between what she says and how she says it is part of the effect. If you're going to use not merely the homeless and the handicapped but sacred cows like cancer, AIDS and 9/11 in jest, it's good to know how to pick up the go-ahead from the audience. Her way of doing that is by seeming as if to be too polite to understand what she's saying. When she uses the word "retards" she at once clarifies that it's offensive and explains: "When I say 'retards,' I mean they can do anything." None of her shticks last long enough to develop. She gets a laugh, and then another one, a third, then quits while she's ahead and goes off on another trajectory. We want her to persist more, heaping one political black eye on top of another. We want to see her in a groove.
Jesus is Magic is not the best showcase for that like it should be, seeing as it's a theatrically released feature film. There are episodes of her show The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central that strike comedy gold. Jesus is Magic hardly even plays as a greatest hits tape by comparison to the episode in which Sarah becomes enraged with the Mongolians after learning that her Russian ancestors were raped by them, or the one where she tries to raise awareness about 9/11 by staging a play in which the Twin Towers are speaking characters and a performer dressed in black tights stretches his arms out and chases them, to which they respond with lines like, "I'm a nice building! Why are you doing this to me?" Here, she cuts away from the performance to small sketches. The opener, in which her sister Laura and her friend Brian Posehn boast about their recent endeavors, is funny because she impeccably plays someone who has never finished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. No problem. But what's with the scene where she amuses the elderly folks at her grandma's nursing home by singing a song telling them they'll all die soon? It works owing to the ostensible oblivion of the old people, but to talk about the film's editing pattern is to imply it has one. There are brusque and sudden cuts between various forms of material: She's on stage, then she's at the nursing home, back on stage. There's a way to make that changeover, but it doesn't necessitate a cut that seems like she was barged in on in the middle of something. And the movie ends too hurriedly, lacking any sort of culmination or conquest in the material. Her act seems brought to a halt a mile before the border. The 70-minute running time is worthy of note, because if you take away the offstage scenes, we see less of her than a live audience would.
If Silverman were untalented or her material wasn't funny, those criticisms would've been a lot easier to write. I love Sarah Silverman. She has a genuine flair, and she is hilarious in a way that's her own. And, as I described before, I think she is skillful at honing writers to her distinctive, self-consciously low-brow style. Jesus is Magic is still a fun watch, but it's mostly because of inestimably hilarious one-liners that she springs on you in pitch-perfect form with the persona I've described, like "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!'" It's just that this is a vehicle that could've launched her, and it's basically a shapeless succession of sometimes hilarious and sometimes not well stuff.
Jesus is Magic is not the best showcase for that like it should be, seeing as it's a theatrically released feature film. There are episodes of her show The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central that strike comedy gold. Jesus is Magic hardly even plays as a greatest hits tape by comparison to the episode in which Sarah becomes enraged with the Mongolians after learning that her Russian ancestors were raped by them, or the one where she tries to raise awareness about 9/11 by staging a play in which the Twin Towers are speaking characters and a performer dressed in black tights stretches his arms out and chases them, to which they respond with lines like, "I'm a nice building! Why are you doing this to me?" Here, she cuts away from the performance to small sketches. The opener, in which her sister Laura and her friend Brian Posehn boast about their recent endeavors, is funny because she impeccably plays someone who has never finished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. No problem. But what's with the scene where she amuses the elderly folks at her grandma's nursing home by singing a song telling them they'll all die soon? It works owing to the ostensible oblivion of the old people, but to talk about the film's editing pattern is to imply it has one. There are brusque and sudden cuts between various forms of material: She's on stage, then she's at the nursing home, back on stage. There's a way to make that changeover, but it doesn't necessitate a cut that seems like she was barged in on in the middle of something. And the movie ends too hurriedly, lacking any sort of culmination or conquest in the material. Her act seems brought to a halt a mile before the border. The 70-minute running time is worthy of note, because if you take away the offstage scenes, we see less of her than a live audience would.
If Silverman were untalented or her material wasn't funny, those criticisms would've been a lot easier to write. I love Sarah Silverman. She has a genuine flair, and she is hilarious in a way that's her own. And, as I described before, I think she is skillful at honing writers to her distinctive, self-consciously low-brow style. Jesus is Magic is still a fun watch, but it's mostly because of inestimably hilarious one-liners that she springs on you in pitch-perfect form with the persona I've described, like "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!'" It's just that this is a vehicle that could've launched her, and it's basically a shapeless succession of sometimes hilarious and sometimes not well stuff.