Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic: Critic Reviews

When she's on, Silverman, with her willingness to say anything, can be liberating: a bomb-tossing jester in the blasphemous-and-proud-of-it tradition of Lenny Bruce and Howard Stern.

Sarah Silverman is a skilled performer, and Jesus Is Magic is occasionally very funny, but don't be fooled: naughty as she may seem, she's playing it safe.

Bad-taste material, delivered with an insouciance that looks easy until you see lesser comics trying it, is what she does best: killer gags about seven-year-old lesbians and Jews killing Jesus.

What she can do is make you laugh your tonsils out. The fact that she shouldn't be saying those things and you shouldn't be laughing at them makes it even more deliciously painful.

Silverman's abrasive material is funny because her approach is friendly.

Sarah Silverman's cartoon bunny rabbit smile could make her the poster child for orthodontia, but it's her timing that's the real thing of beauty.

For her first concert film, comedian Sarah Silverman trots out about 40 minutes' worth of her best stand-up material and pads the rest with an assortment of ill-conceived and unfunny skits and musical numbers.

Silverman comes across as a racist, callous diva in Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic.

Jesus Is Magic manages to push hot buttons with a deceptively tender caress.

Jesus Is Magic is the second part of the title of comic Sarah Silverman's very funny, very wrong movie, which weaves wacky musical numbers and odd backstage moments with an L.A. performance of her one-woman show.

A movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie.

Silverman throws her carefully crafted persona a proper, and hilarious, coming-out party.

If you can stand the profanity, the crudeness, and the merciless strafing of all things noble and sacrosanct, then you'll find yourself huddled over in a painful ball of nonstop guffaws.

Yes, it's sick. Yes, it's funny.

I wouldn't take my mother, but this stand-up movie is pretty funny.

The comedian and her director, Liam Lynch, have framed about an hour's worth of concert footage with bogus backstage scenes to pad this out to feature length.

The movie lures us into that forbidden garden where the funniest things are precisely the things we're not supposed to laugh at, only to yank us out of that paradise and draw our attention to the things it desperately wants us to laugh at.

Silverman's onstage persona might be limited, but it's endlessly resonant.

Those musical interludes interrupt the flow of Silverman's carefully pitched act just as distractingly as the heckling of a drunken patron.

Sarah Silverman is the most outrageously funny woman alive.

She makes fun of bigotry by pretending to be a bigot; hypocrisy by pretending to be a hypocrite; and stupidity by pretending to be dumb.

Ultimately, it's difficult to resist...especially when she comes out with lines like: "I don't care if you think I'm racist - I just want you to think I'm thin."

Her comic persona is that of a clueless and politically incorrect hipster who says terrible things without being aware of their shock value. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.