Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Jesus is Magic consists of a Silverman stand-up routine interspersed with a handful of musical numbers and bookended by scenes setting up and resolving the premise. The premise is that she's sitting around talking with two friends who are disgustingly successful and to top their accomplishments she concocts a story that she has sold a show and will be doing it that evening. She walks out of her friend's apartment and busts into a singing soliloquy in which she tries to figure out how to make her impromptu fabrication into reality. The show wisely doesn't dwell on the premise much. Silverman is a stand-up comic, not a comedic actor, at least not yet. The scenes where she is playing the character, rather than telling stand-up jokes or singing stand-up jokes, are just not that funny.

The stand-up is funny. It made people in the audience laugh, both the live audience and the movie audience. That's not the end of the story with comedy like Silverman's or Chappelle's or South Park's because at some level it feels like there's something not quite right about laughing at some of these jokes. On the one hand, laughing when Silverman says that the best time to be pregnant is when you're a black teenager seems to show that the person laughing is beyond racism. A racist might respond with a bitter guffaw rather than a laugh. On the other hand, the racist might also just laugh because the joke works on a misdirection that is independent of the race element. One can laugh at the joke either as a reinforcement of racist attitudes or because one is so un-racist that it's ok to laugh at anyone. It's difficult before the fact to tell whether the influence of these comics will be positive or negative.

Andrew Sullivan has lately been singing the praises of this comedy which he calls part of post-PC culture. Here he excerpts an email recognizing this type of comedy cuts both ways. Apparently one of the reasons Chapelle hung it up was that someone, in a scene like that of Bamboozled, laughed a little too loudly. This from What would Phoebe do? is insightful:

The Sullivan reader who writes in that "post-PC" humor is nihilistic is mostly correct. It can't be embraced by anyone for political reasons, because anyone with sincere concerns, left or right or gay-libertarian-right-center, is a loser.
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Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman both have some good jokes. But the problem with "post-PC" comedy is that it has--and this is where nihilism comes in--made a fool of anyone who cares about the world. By "problem" I mean problem for Sullivan, who sees this comedy as somehow indicative of his own politics coming into fashion. I find plenty of comedy both horribly offensive and hilarious ("Annie Hall," much of "Seinfeld"), so for me this isn't especially problematic.
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I happen to prefer comedy which preserves a bit of political correctness, albeit in a subtle form, and think--outside the realm of comedy--that the message of tolerance sent by even dippy-sounding jargon is often overlooked and surprisingly valuable.

I sort of agree. I think that making an effort to respect people's feelings as part of a deeper respect for people in general is a Good Thing. When does the Good Thing become less so? I'm not sure. I'd need to think about it.

Update: Sullivan mocks this critic's take on Silverman's comedy because he or she is a poseur. Sullivan is right, but the critic is also right too, once you cut the crap. I've done my best to do just that below.

Seriously, even if one takes these arguments at face value, what does Silverman's meta-bigotry have to say about authentic bigotry? Generalizations don't work all that well? Racism is stupid? How searing and insightful.
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My initial white-hot adoration gave way to knotting qualms and nagging questions. I wanted to unambiguously 'get' her, but kept coming back to thorny moments where I felt like I was simply being probed and exploited by someone looking for remnants of reaction.
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I think Silverman probably falls much more squarely in with Jimmy Kimmel's The Man Show or Matt Parker and Trey Stone's South Park where giving the middle finger to the tired old guard of tolerance is its own nihilistic end game.
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Both the impolitic and the "politically incorrect" are themselves market norms; so common that everyone from Dennis Miller to Coulter can envision themselves heavyweight shadow boxers with the ghost of political correctness.