"I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"

Irony Maiden - How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy. By Sam Anderson:

"She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: 'Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.' (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: 'I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.' A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered 'Faggot'—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.

...Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the "meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.

...Silverman has a gift for inspiring absurdly instructive public controversy. Her most notorious fiasco occurred in 2001, when she told a joke on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that unapologetically hinged on the word "chink." This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the "piss-shit-suck-fuck" paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, "Joe Franklin raped me"—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released ("I didn't like the nature of that wisecrack"), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far."