What's the deal with Sarah Silverman? What's the deal with comedy, for that matter? For a while I thought that Comedy Central (Comedy Partners, MTV Networks, Viacom) was exercising some sort of internal editorial protest against the MTV model by actually playing a fair bit of stand-up comedy in the programming line-up of the comedy television channel. No, it appears that comedy performance is still very much in the social currency.
Sarah Silverman is a comedian, anyway, and she is formerly recognized as "hot," you know, physically, and she is "controversial," in that she treats topics that are taboo in her routines.
It appears that this culture takes some sort of particular and unseemly pleasure in watching a conventionally pretty girl tell filthier than average jokes. On further consideration, this is probably not much more of a revelation than observing that the public mind is enticed by the idea of professional cheerleaders having intoxicated sex in a public restroom.
So as usual, Ms. Silverman as a phenomenon is easy enough to understand with the bare minimum of facts. It still irritates me that my fellow journalists (just kidding) can't get over the fact that she's pretty, like it's so amazing and sort of laudable that a pretty girl would do anything other than just hang around looking good. The other thing that irritates me is the comparison being made to Lenny Bruce. The difference, and I acknowledge that it's a subtle one, is the part where Bruce gets arrested for obscenity.
So anyway, I decide to go to the source, or at least a source, and find out about Silverman's new movie, Jesus Is Magic. Before I lose patience completely with its glacial, laboring flash interface I manage to extract this:
Despite the current political climate, in JESUS IS MAGIC she takes on such pitch-black topics as September 11th, unwanted body hair, and the Holocaust, and spins them into decidedly un-politically correct comedic gold.
Does that list of example topics seem weird to anyone else? Sort of a kink somewhere in the middle, something doesn't quite fit? What's up with that?
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