Half concert film, half original songs/sketches from Sarah Silverman.
I'd been looking forward to this one since The Aristocrats, the one-joke documentary in which Silverman gave the joke one of its funniest twists by pretending that it wasn't a joke at all. Unfortunately, those few minutes are funnier than anything in Jesus Is Magic.
Silverman's shtick is to play up the contrast between her innocent, sweet-natured demeanor and the button-pushing offensiveness of her material; she repeatedly describes her jokes as "edgy." She's especially fond of using shocking ethnic jokes as a way of making fun of racists. Before The Aristocrats, in fact, she was probably best known for the controversy surrounding her appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, where she used the word "chinks," offending Asian-American activists who didn't quite get the point.
She talks about that incident briefly here, and it's one of her better moments. "I saw myself on TV, being portrayed as a racist," she says (and all quotes here are from memory). "As a Jewish person, I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media."
There are some nice small jokes here (worrying about her biological clock: "The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager"), and Silverman delivers her material with impeccable timing, but the act never finds a focus; each joke gets its laugh and we're instantly on to something else, never sticking with any idea long enough to build to a really great comic capper.
The original songs that occasionally interrupt Silverman's act aren't particularly memorable, though she sings them well enough; her encore performance of "Amazing Grace," though, is unforgettable, and gives the movie its funniest two minutes.
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