Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

I've seen a lot of short movies lately. Anything under 90 minutes...In some ways, it kind of feels like a small failure. I mean, an hour and a half is basically industry standard; if you can't even get that far, maybe there are some basic structural flaws in the concept. Whenever you see a mainstream film, particularly a comedy, that comes in at 75 or 80 minutes, that's kind of a red flag.

But sometimes, a shorter movie has advantages. In just over an hour, there isn't really time for a movie to wear out its welcome. Sure, if it's bad anyway, it will still be bad, but it will never have that oppressive "long bad movie that feels like it will never end" kind of feeling. Like Meet Joe Black, a movie so bad and so long, I thought while watching it that director Martin Brest had actually invented some sort of wormhole or rip in the cosmic continuum allowing him to produce a film outside of the physical reality of time and space. Like a perpetual motion machine of Suck.

And, believe me, Sarah Silverman's swift 75 minute stand-up film, Jesus is Magic benefits from a brief running time. I know that sounds like a back-handed compliment, but it's not meant as one. It's a perfectly, um, forward-handed compliment.



The film Jesus is Magic mostly records Silverman's very funny one-woman Off-Broadway show of last year. It's mainly her intentionally offensive, frequently crude stand-up act, interspersed with brief skits and a few musical numbers.

When the film is just stand-up, it's terrific. Silverman's jokes are all pretty similar - she says something really offensive, but with a wide-eyed, innocent delivery, as if she doesn't know it's offensive. Then, she acts like she's going to reverse her offensive statement, when really she goes even further, making it more offensive.

The whole thing is built almost entirely around ironic distance. Silverman constantly threatens to remove the pretense from her set, to reveal that, though she says a lot of racist things, she's doing it to mock racism, and not to express it. But she never quite does. As I said, every time it looks like she's going to come clean, to admit her mutual respect for everyone equally, she pulls a reversal and tells another offensive joke.

At the end of the set, she says:

"I don't think it would be right to do an entire show built on stereotypes. I don't do that. I build my material off of facts. Women make 70% as much as men. Fact. Every 30 seconds, in America, a minority jumps up and down waving his arms behind a local news reporter. Fact."

That about sums up her material right there. It's all very funny, and there's just something intangibly great about seeing a very attractive female comedian who's so funny and open and crude.

But a little of it does kind of go a long way. I found myself noticing the format of Silverman's jokes, when it would probably have been better if I was too busy laughing. I bet I could make the same statement about Chris Rock jokes from "Bring the Pain" if I paid enough attention, but I never have a chance to focus on the minutae like that.

And the sketches and songs aren't really up to the level of the stand-up. An opening segment in which comics Laura Silverman (Sarah's sister) and Brian Posehn (from "Mr. Show" and, most recently, Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects) brag to Sarah about their careers, prompting her to invent Jesus is Magic on the spot, drags on and on and on to a predictable finish.

And a lot of the songs, though semi-catchy and well-sung by Silverman, aren't terribly funny. Worse, many of them just repeat jokes from her stand-up act. After we've seen her do a very amusing 5 minutes on Jewish people buying German cars, we see a song in which Silverman, dressed like a 60's go-go dancer, walks through a parking lot goofing on...a Jewish guy in a German car.

I think 20 more minutes of this or so would have been too much.

Oh, before I forget, one other small thing that bothered me, though it's not Silverman's fault. I know that she's involved romantically with Jimmy Kimmel. It's been in newspapers, I've seen them talk about it, it's out there...So when I see her doing very graphic jokes about sex with "her boyfriend," I unfortunately have to picture James Kimmel in there. It's weird. There's one joke in particular, about performing fellatio with the aid of fruit preserves, that's really disturbing when you know it's the former host of "The Man Show."

I like Sarah Silverman. I like her comedy. And, like most other male fans of stand-up comedy, I kind of have a crush on her. I'm just saying, Jesus Is Magic, though entertaining and sporadically hilarious, probably would have been better just as 75-80 minutes of stand-up. Or even an hour-long HBO special.