Question Celebrity

Knowing full well that my advance deadline and the short half-life of celebrity romance may render this musing obsolete, I present my ideal showbiz couple: ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and extremely crass comedian Sarah Silverman. "We have a unique relationship in that I'm the woman and Sarah's the man," Kimmel, 39, says, in a not-terribly-old Esquire I read in a waiting room. A Q&A with the couple explores what makes their relationship the lasting, potty-mouthed, completely uninhibited success that Justin and Cameron, or Vince and Jennifer, never could have hoped to attain.

If you're looking for deeply cynical, underappreciated, generally disliked performers, you can often do no better than comedians. Watch the documentary "The Aristocrats" again, only this time, look at all the ways these comedians seem broke, beaten, damaged: pallid skin, voices raw from cigarette, bad dental veneers. Except for Silverman, 36, who positively glows, even as her material catapults past what a nice girl is allowed to say about race, sex, disability and anything else. She and Kimmel have been a couple for several years, though they still don't live together. She is sometimes a guest on his show, giving us a glimpse of their simple chemistry. They are happy to talk about anything, it seems, and present themselves as blissfully unmanaged people, free of the publicist's clinch. They aren't, as Kimmel tells Esquire, "popular enough to have paparazzi chasing us." ("I'm always in those tabloids where they show who's badly dressed," Silverman says. " . . . [E]ach time I'm getting my picture taken, I'm thinking, This is a nice outfit . . . " until the picture is published.)

The couple talks to Esquire freely about her bed-wetting episodes and his lumpy physique, and how, in her act, she has frequently mentioned her fascination for certain parts of his anatomy, which, she tells audiences, smell like her grandmother's house. "Why do you have to use me for an example?" Kimmel wants to know.

"What about you?" she says. "You say that I go to the bathroom and that I have gas."

"Sarah claims that she never moves her bowels," Kimmel says.

"You know that I don't. And you say that on your show all the time. So you're a hypocrite."

Imagine if Reese and Ryan had been able to talk to the press this way. When people ask what kind of celebrity you'd like to be, here's your answer: the kind that can make public pillow talk out of poop jokes.

E-mail: celebrity@washpost.com.