A Comic Sweet as Punch

She does a riff on a (made-up) past boyfriend who was "half-black," but then corrects herself for being so pessimistic. "He was half-white." She tells him it's okay, "he would have made a really expensive slave in olden times."

But: "How can I be racist?" she asks the audience. "I went out with a Mexican man. Do racists go out with Mexicans? Noo. They're filthy."

Her movie, which opened in limited release in New York and L.A. last week, has gotten some strong reviews. "The most outrageously funny woman alive," Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone, comparing her work to Lenny Bruce's.

Others are less smitten. "Once you become accustomed to the material and begin to anticipate it, some of the shine comes off the act," said Pete Vonder Harr in online magazine Film Threat. A.O. Scott of the New York Times observed that "this kind of transgression has long since become ritualized and normalized, and Ms. Silverman's act is the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right. Her version of insult humor is actually flattering, both to herself and to those who find it funny."

Silverman reminds us that she makes this stuff up.

"I am a character different from myself onstage," she says. "But I'm still pretty much myself."

A character that is oblivious.

"Think of an arrogant ignorance."

A kind of sweet sociopath?

"No!"

But you're, or rather she's, awful.

"I just do the stuff that tickles me personally. I'm tickled by the idea of the unreliable narrator." She says, "I enjoy complete absurdity, presented very small and real."