Sarah Silverman in "Jesus Is Magic"

In a brief review note in the current New Yorker magazine, veteran critic David Denby calls Sarah Silverman “the hippest comic working today.” I don’t have nearly enough of a relevant frame of reference to dispute or confirm this description, but there’s little doubt, on the evidence of Jesus is Magic (the movie Denby was responding to), that Silverman is trying to stake out a flagrantly violative performance territory. In one self-mocking but exhibitionist moment, she tells an audience “I’m sassy and brassy.” This, of course, is a parody of what she’s really doing.

Her stage manner is friendly, almost intimate—most of the time, anyway—but she’s bluntly deploying sensibility—and expectation—assaultive material. She deftly plays with her audience’s nervous sense of complicity in her gross-outs and trampling on moral conventions. There’s also a self-dramatizingly absurdest element at work. Think Steve Martin with socially-themed smut and you’ll be conceptually close.

The movie (directed by Liam Lynch) is mostly a record of a performance in a North Hollywood theater, interrupted by a few music video-ish spoofs and a comedy-sketch prologue and epilogue. Much of Silverman’s performance tack involves massey shot assaults on racial dignity and middle-class liberal psychology. One throwaway: “I was raped by a doctor. So bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”

Her stage persona is of a potty-mouthed, over-opinionated and vacuously narcissistic JAP. At one point, she pretends to complain about a black guy who took umbrage when she paid a very dubious tribute to his superior qualities by telling him he would have been a very expensive slave in another century: “I’m not responsible for what he hears. He has to learn to live with himself before I can stop hating his people!”

But at another juncture, when she lets loose fake invective against “Martin Loser King,” the pose gets a little strained. “I want to be the first comedian to shit on” King she says, and it doesn’t seem like an implausible claim. Assault comedy isn’t necessarily calculated to purge and ironize; sometimes it’s primarily for the explosive effect. And sometimes, Silverman is less edgy than blunt-edged. When she tells the people in the theatre that her grandmother—“Thank God”—was in “one of the better concentration camps” and got a vanity-number tattoo on her arm, the result isn’t really a fleeting sharp comment on Holocaust possessiveness, but, rather, an aggressive nastiness. (It’s not as if the subject is always out of bounds. Recall Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” number in The Producers.) And I found her scatologically lewd stuff had grown tedious sometime before her finale’s gleefully affrontive use of the old hymn, “Amazing Grace.”

Silverman is at least as skilled an actress as a writer and she’s very effective when she’s not overplaying her hands. Her schtick—that’s what it really is—is out of a show biz lineage that goes back to more than Lenny Bruce. Even though he’d almost certainly heartily disapprove of her act, Bob Hope might well understand what she’s trying to do.