Nerve.com - Sarah Silverman

Nerve.com Screening Room:

"Silverman, by contrast, has quietly been constructing a persona that's wholly incautious, ascending in the footsteps of Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock.

Her new film, Jesus is Magic, borders on brilliant. She doesn't understand, for example, after being told that she can't say 'chink' on TV, how 'Jews lost control of the media.' 'What kind of a world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can't say chink on network television? It's like the fifties.' She's horrified that her sister has grounded her seven-year-old daughter for coming out as a lesbian. 'No pussy for a week. Right? I mean, to us, as adults, it may not seem like that big a deal, but to a little kid a week is, like, a really long time.' And she can't comprehend how after the 'alleged' holocaust, Jews can still drive German cars. 'It's just so. . .' She pauses to search for right word, touching her forehead with the tip of her finger: 'Gay.'

Her clueless delivery nearly makes you forget that, with this last one, you're laughing at a xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-questioning one-liner. By piling one inappropriate comment onto another as if they're all a matched set, she succeeds in convincing us that they pretty much are.

At the screening, the woman sitting next to me laughed hysterically at all the jokes about gays, blacks and poor people, and was dead silent through all the jokes about Jews. Do you find people are more willing to laugh at jokes that don't apply to them?

That's hilarious. Yes. Listen, if you don't find Holocaust jokes funny, then they're going to be offensive. She was probably too close to the material, and I can respect that. I would never be like, "Oh, she just doesn't get it." But I'm not going to change it either. I'm sure there's comedy that could offend me but I wouldn't expect someone to change it just because it hit a nerve.

We live in an age where everything's very politically correct, but the motivation to be non-offensive doesn't come from any sort of moral compass. It comes from a fear of losing advertisers, losing consumers, losing money, bad publicity, and all these reasons that I don't care about, reasons that have nothing to do with humanity."