SARAH SILVERMAN!

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/bolonik


EXCERPT:

Cringe-worthy comedy is nothing new: Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman's respective strains of humor were less about eliciting laughter than provoking discomfort as a means to achieve the funny. But since the 1990 premiere of Seinfeld, comedy that unsettles has become the comedians' lingua franca. Practitioners like Larry David--who created Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm--have taken this dark, cutting, often self-deprecating humor mainstream. In Curb, the joke's usually on David, so you feel a little less guilty for laughing. English comics Ricky Gervais (The BBC's The Office) and Sacha Baron Cohen (Da Ali G Show, Borat) and American female comedians Laura Kightlinger (The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman) and Kathy Griffin (My Life on the D List) level their sardonic humor at particular targets--show business and celebrity, Los Angeles, xenophobes, anti-Semites, racists, aspiring homeboys, the middle class, fashionistas.

But then there is Sarah Silverman (Jesus Is Magic, The Sarah Silverman Program): with her puppy-dog eyes, childish shrug, grab-the-crotch bravado and dopey, oops-did-I-just-fart grin (I list these qualities with affection--these are her selling points), the lacerating Levite revels in being as aimless with her spiteful humor as a kid with an Uzi water gun, hitting everyone in sight for no particular reason.

There are many enlightened, progressive-minded people who either boldly or discreetly cop to laughing with her. I am forced to admit that I've not only watched Jesus Is Magic and her occasionally funny series The Sarah Silverman Program but variously giggled and then felt sickened by her coltish cunt-teuse persona. I both laughed and gagged at her deranged, catchy ditties about a farting contest gone wrong ("I just wanted to be like the others, but I pooped instead"), a comically bad stab at lesbian feminist folk and a "love song" that runs through nearly every cultural stereotype our culture has to offer...