Sarah Silverman: Funny or not? Hot or not?

One thing: her bit in The Aristocrats was not only funny, it was truly disturbing (in a good way, I think, but I'm not entirely sure of that). I believe that what she's brought up front and centre -- alongside the aforementioned white-chick-making-racist-jokes shtick -- is the relatively unexplored humour of post-traumatic stress, the thousand yard standup. She's not alone in this, but ever since the likes of Stephen King articulated it, and Sam Raimi visualised it, the idea of screaming while laughing (while puking, while dissociating?) has gathered a certain amount of force. Personally -- and this is entirely opinion, of course -- I love that SS does this with a (distractingly superficial) sass and perkiness. More fucking power to whatever she's trying to do, ha ha.

(She needs to write more jokes, though.)

she was the voice of:

http://www.sassman.com/katz/scans/laura-hands.jpg

She's hot, but I'll have to see Jesus Is Magic before I decide about the funny.

Still haven't seen Jesus Is Magic, but I thought the Sarah Silverman Program premier was pretty damn funny.

Which is saying a lot.

xpost Yeah the songs need to go.

I do agree about the songs though.

Which is saying a lot.

I guess so, she has some funny lines. Not even getting into popularity and stuff, they both are relatively good-looking (amazingly beautiful for stand-up comedians) and play up their sex appeal by giving the opposite sex jokes they will appreciate. For Cook that means broad observational humor and for Silverman it's gross humor and a more generally surreal and iconoclastic sense of humor that only men tend to appreciate.

For instance, the desecration of a famous childhood icon, that's something that most men and few women find generally funny as an idea. Silverman is one of the only female comics you'll see who seems to be in tune with liking that sort of thing and indulges in that sort of humor (for better or worse) like a man.

On network television funny women make jokes at their own expense. On cable they have license to poke fun at everyone else.

The comic heroine Sarah Silverman plays on her new Comedy Central series, “The Sarah Silverman Program,” is not adorably neurotic. Actually she thinks she is just fine: not too fat, not too single, not too lazy or unemployed. It’s the people around her who are pathetic. A friend calls, saying, “Hi, it’s Natalie.” Sarah, who is sprawled on her couch watching television, replies, “Tall, thin Natalie, or Natalie Bishop?”

Sarah is childish, narcissistic and manipulative — “Mean Girls” meets Larry David. “I’m just like you,” she says in a sugar-toned introductory voice-over. “I live in Valley Village, I don’t have a job, and my sister pays the rent.”

And Ms. Silverman’s show about nothing is quite funny. The episodes are not as layered or intricately constructed as Mr. David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but the humor is fueled by a similar jolt of the politically incorrect. There are few other forms of humor on Comedy Central, of course, so Ms. Silverman’s stands out mostly because the slurs are spoken by a pretty young woman, and a knowing one.

On “Curb,” the fictional Larry David is unaware he is giving offense and indignant when accused of it. Sarah says horrible things about homosexuals, blacks, women, police officers, the disabled, the homeless and leukemia patients with a guileless cruelty.

Maybe it’s a feminist milestone: finally, a woman as cheerfully, innocently malevolent as the Malcolm McDowell character in “A Clockwork Orange” (though slightly less prone to violence). And Ms. Silverman, 36, whose stand-up routine, “Jesus Is Magic,” was made into a movie in 2005, the same year she appeared in the documentary “The Aristocrats” with a startling joke (“Joe Franklin raped me”), is a new kind of female sitcom heroine, very different from the generation of Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers or Roseanne Barr and Paula Poundstone.

And Sarah is certainly different from network sitcom heroines: not at all like the winsome shrinking violet Tina Fey plays on “30 Rock” or even the struggling divorcée Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays on “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” Sarah is even more insensitive and self-absorbed than Elaine was on “Seinfeld.”

And that alone is noteworthy. Comedy Central, home to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, “South Park,” “Blue Collar TV” and late-night infomercials for “Girls Gone Wild,” is one of the more male-oriented cable networks: Lifetime for Jackasses.

In a promotional spot for her show Ms. Silverman stands on an outdoor court in tennis whites and urges viewers to tune in. “And hey,” she says with a “Goodbye, Columbus” smile, “for most of you who watch Comedy Central this is the closest you’re going to get to a vagina.”

Currently Ms. Silverman is the only woman to have her own weekly series on Comedy Central; her show has been picked up for a six-week engagement. And only a few have been given comedy specials: comics like Wanda Sykes and most recently Lisa Lampanelli, whose stand-up routine, “Dirty Girl,” consists of her heckling her mostly gay audience in Don-Rickles-in-a-dress mode (though blacks are also a favorite target).

Ms. Silverman is as scatological as any young male comedian, relying on flatulence jokes and crude sexual remarks, along with a steady stream of aspersions about gay people and blacks. At a coffee shop she calls her sister gay, then turns to her two gay neighbors apologetically. “I don’t mean gay like homosexual,” she says sweetly. “I mean gay like retarded.”

She is funniest doing absurdist material. In one episode she steps from the narrative into a music video in which she sings a sad, folksy ballad about world peace in a white gauzy dress as ocean waves foam in the background.

When her loving, uncritical sister, Laura (played by Ms. Silverman’s real-life sister, Laura Silverman), comes to pick her up from jail, Laura and the arresting officer (Jay Johnston) instantly fall in love. When she tells the officer that her last name is Silverman as they walk back to her car, the officer says tenderly, “I believe the Holocaust was completely uncalled for.” Laura, just as smitten, coos, “Oh, don’t worry about it.”

Comics are supposed to serve as navigators, using ridicule and parody to chart human nature and social conventions. Their riffs are only as funny as they are unexpected and unsettling, and surprise is hard to pull off on a 24-hour cable network entirely devoted to humor. After a while viewers turn numb to even the best material, nodding like professional comedians who acknowledge a colleague’s joke not by laughing but by saying, “Funny.”

Ms. Silverman’s sardonic humor is not really new to Comedy Central, but her persona is.

She is not the old model of the self-deprecating female moaning about the size of her thighs and bad boyfriends or the crude male comic complaining about his girlfriend’s thighs and bad boyfriends.

Sarah is the comic embodiment of a feline, self-centered femininity. Ms. Silverman’s material is as raw and profane as any man’s, but served up slyly.

i still stand by this!

http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/sarahsilvermanmaxim.jpg

sarah looking akward on the cover of maxim

She's still hott

Weren't there like all of six episodes of her show or did I miss something?

Sarah's normally got the hottitude but she's making quite the distressed little monkey face there.

sarah looking akward on the cover of maxim

a little, yeah, esp. since she's said many times that she has a hate/hate relationship with her body hair, which leans toward the thick and dark. And they hand her an ape costume? Rude.

but yes, of course, she is v pretty.

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/2577/dietrichxd6.jpg