Jesus Is Magic

Jesus Is Magic (2005) 62 (Metacritic: 63)

Sarah Silverman is what I term a “rep” comedian. She’s someone you go see because of her reputation, as opposed to going to see her do some famous bits. Like Dave Attell and Patton Oswalt (and many comedians these days), Silverman’s comedy is part storytelling, part acting. While, Oswalt appears to be simply be himself on stage, both Silverman and Attell essentially play versions of themselves. The two of them are also particularly adept at using irony to complete a phrase or segment either by introducing a completely unforeseen element into the ending or by pulling a complete non sequitur out of thin air. It can be cheap, but it’s effective.

Attell clearly resembles his tubby, boozy, sleazy-but-fun persona, but Silverman’s success comes from playing a character not unlike Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm or Stephen Colbert. You know she’s probably not a cold, bitchy, self-centered, dimwitted, quasi-bigot in real life, but we never get to see the real Sarah Silverman. Even in public situations, she’s doing something like “Fucking Matt Damon.”

Silverman’s shtick hinges on one crucial conceit. A pretty, Jewish girl says horribly crude things but gets away with it because she flashes a cute smile and plays it off with infectious, infantile naïveté. She feeds off the “hottest comedian” tag quite often, and her male fans really eat it up. However, like many women in male-dominated professions, she’s really just hot by proxy. It’s kind of like Danica Patrick being the hottest Indy car/NASCAR driver. Are both women attractive? Sure. Are they Scarlett Johansson, Bar Refaeli, Emmanuelle Béart (pre-lip disaster), Ingrid Bergman, or Grace Kelly hot? (Hello, page views!) Not in the least.

In Jesus Is Magic, we can finally wipe the fanboy drool clean. Director Liam Lynch turns Silverman’s one-woman show into a quasi concert film with musical numbers and video asides featuring her sister, Laura, and Brian Posehn. (These appear to be the inspiration for her brilliant sitcom, “The Sarah Silverman Program.”) Because as it turns out, Silverman’s comedy works extremely well in scripted situations, but it can be extremely uncomfortable to experience firsthand. Now, there’s nothing inherently bad about comedy that’s discomfiting, but when she continually tosses off cracks about Nazis, sexual assault, racial slurs, and whatnot, her act ceases to be shockingly funny and just becomes icky. At times, it feels like Lynch has to pan the camera to the audience in near-embarrassment to prove to us that indeed people actually are watching this and laughing.

However, just as we’re shifting around on the couch and looking at the ficus and wondering how long the DVD actually is, we cut away from the stage for music videos for “You’re Gonna Die Soon” and “German Cars” and suddenly, her act works again. In the latter, there’s a very meta moment where Silverman sings about how marginalized groups empower themselves by embracing the worst slurs against them. (Sounds dry, I know, but it’s not.) Then, she drops an N-bomb in front of two black guys—who at this moment really stand for all of us in the audience, regardless of our race. The song stops, they stare her down, then start laughing with her, then stare her down again while she twists a bit for laughing too long. It’s a huge, uncomfortable mess that sums up racial issues succinctly and hilariously, and it’s the only time we ever see her react with trepidation to what she’s saying. (This could also be related to another joke about blacks and the Chinese.) Just like in real life, we want to be able to laugh together and take the power out of these stupid words, but we’re just not there yet. Fortunately, this is Silverman’s movie, and she has an out. She turns to the camera and sings, “Cha cha cha!” Because that’s the only possible way anyone could get out of it.

The sitcom character Sarah Silverman works where the stand-up character Sarah Silverman doesn’t because I just don’t want her to exist in my world if she’s never going to stop playing it straight. And that’s a serious problem I have with Colbert. Sometimes we need to know that you’re just telling jokes, even if we “get it.” Inside a TV episode, Silverman can be racially insensitive, call Nazis cute, and offend the elderly with a wink and a smile, and not even have to break the fourth wall for us to understand that it’s all a joke. But if her public persona never wavers or shows us what’s behind the act, how can we ever be sure she doesn’t actually feel these things? Like the two guys in the video, we’re laughing along with you for a while, Sarah Silverman (whoever you are), but when we stop laughing, we need to see you squirm.