A Comic Sweet as Punch

She did get in hot water for using an ethnic slur for Chinese people on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." She reprises the incident in "Jesus Is Magic." Her use of racial, ethnic and sexual labels isn't unique, but it is consistent: She uses them -- a lot. And often in a way her admirers find clever (like "Guess what, Martin Luther King? I had a dream too. I had a dream that I was in my living room . . .").

"It's just what I'm into," she says. "I hope I move on from it. Because it's getting really race-heavy, my material. But I feel like it's this elephant in the room. What, are we going to pretend that there's no racial tension? It will never go away."

It takes us a moment to realize that Silverman is being serious.

"Because there's resentment and then there's white guilt and then there's resentment of the guilt and so there's a never-ending thing that separates us. I'm not trying to say my comedy is about something. I value those jokes as much as the stupid fart jokes or whatever. I want it to be silly. I want it to be funny above anything else. But that's why I write material like that. Because I'm obsessed by it."

Sam Seder, a former boyfriend who directed Silverman in an obscure miniseries called "Pilot Season," a showbiz mockumentary, says: "I never understood why stand-up was so important to her, and I still don't. But it is." Unlike many comics, Seder says, Silverman doesn't see stand-up as just a stop on the way to her own sitcom or a career in acting. But that may be where she is headed.

Last month, Silverman taped a pilot for Comedy Central about . . . Sarah Silverman. The cable network has not yet announced its fate, but there may be much more Sarah Silverman in the future.

"The pilot episode," she explains, "is just about me and I need four AA batteries for my remote because I can't change the channel and the TV is stuck on this CARE commercial about kids with leukemia and of course it doesn't dawn on me to actually manually change the channel. So I go out on an adventure looking for AAs and obstacles are in my way."

Like?

"A wheelchair marathon, blocking the road. And I'm like, what's this? I go to the barricade and ask the cop and he says what does it look like? Umm, some kind of anti-leg rally?"

There you go.

"I can go on and on, beat by beat," she says. Eventually the Sarah character meets God, who happens to be black. "We end up having sex. There's this uncomfortable morning after." Silverman smiles a dreamy smile. "But he was just . . . amazing."