A Comic Sweet as Punch

Sarah Silverman Knocks 'em Down Standing Up

LOS ANGELES

Sarah Silverman does eat with the same mouth she talks with. The naughty minx stretches out on the cafe settee and groans with belly pleasure.

"I'm so disgusted with myself."

The waiter looks down at her, still supine, and mentions dessert. "Ooooh. I'm so full. I ate like an animal!" Like it was his fault she ate a wedge of iceberg lettuce. "With [expletive] blue cheese dressing," she says in her daddy's-little-girl voice. "With chopped walnuts." The waiter says the gelato is yummy. "Then you eat it," Silverman hisses.

She rises up and smiles her big unnaturally bright white smile. It's all just flirty fun. But maybe the waiter thinks, and maybe you think, too: This chick is crazy.

Crazy in a good way, yeah? It's an act.

Silverman is very hot right now, very outre, very edgy. In the current issue of Fade In magazine she's photographed sitting on a toilet; in Entertainment Weekly she's on a swing set in a cocktail dress.

Swing set and toilet. That's Sarah Silverman.

Long a favorite among a hip crowd who followed her stand-up career and admired her small but memorable turns on "Greg the Bunny" or "The School of Rock" or the dirty-joke documentary "The Aristocrats" or the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson (where she quipped, of Courtney Love's deranged appearance, "I'm glad she's here. I left my crack in my other purse"). Now she is in the big room with a movie all her own, performing her off-Broadway comic routine in the film "Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic," which opens today in Washington.

In the movie, Silverman performs a couple of kitsch singing numbers (she does "Amazing Grace" sung by her various body parts and a folk song at a retirement home with a lyric that goes "It's not cold in here. You're just going to die soon") and there's some backstage sketches -- Sarah and her bong; Sarah and her sister; and Sarah throwing a fit because her agent provides the wrong bottled water, which "tastes thick."

But most of the film is her doing her stand-up before an audience in L.A., an act in which her "persona," a character like and unlike the real Sarah Silverman, muses upon starving babies, body smells and rape.

She mentions that her grandmother, her beloved nana, survived the Holocaust -- at "one of the better camps." She tackles religion ("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 who believe it was the blacks").