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April 7, 2006
The unstoppable Silverman
Comic's film and some family fare come to Vancouver festival.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
A short list of the people Sarah Silverman targets in her comedy
routine: blacks, Jews, Asians, Christians, gays, victims of the
Holocaust and 9/11. In other words, she's an equal-opportunity offender.
"I don't think I pull punches," the comedian said in an
e-mail interview with the Independent. "I just go with
what's funny – with an eye towards keeping it balanced."
Silverman's movie, Jesus is Magic, gets a late-night run
at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival this weekend – and it
will be interesting to see how her unapologetically outrageous schtick
plays in this relatively conservative town. This is, after all,
the woman who got fired from Saturday Night Live after responding
to news of a mandatory abortion waiting period with the line, "Quite
frankly, I think it's a good law. I was going to get an abortion
the other day. I totally wanted an abortion.... And it turns out
I was just thirsty."
Silverman conceded that the reaction to her film had been geographically
skewed.
"I heard in Salt Lake City, they renamed it Sarah Silverman
Movie, to avoid any blasphemy in the title," she said.
"But I look at it as, 'Wow – they played my movie there!'
"
Despite the ability to play – indeed, outplay – such giants
of old-school Borscht-Belt comedy as George Carlin and Don Rickles
(in The Aristocrats, it was Silverman who told the most shocking
version of the old joke), she's reluctant to peg her comic style
to any one tradition.
"No comic," she said, "wants to muse about what their
comedy 'means....' I don't, anyway ... it takes you out of it. It
can be really identity crisis-inducing. What I'm like or why the
audience likes or doesn't like what I do – that's for [the
audience] to say."
Her chameleon-like character is so hard to pin down, it's tough
to think of questions to stump her – although all the slavering
young men I polled suggested I ask Silverman why she is dating that
schlub Jimmy Kimmel. (Except for one Israeli immigrant, who said,
"Why doesn't she make more jokes about Jews?")
In fact, it's early on in Silverman's all-singing, all-dancing stand-up
routine that she mentions her "past":
"I was raped," she says slowly, "by a Jewish doctor
... [a musing pause] ... which is so bittersweet for a Jewish
girl."
Her family, she said, love that line.
Jesus is Magic screens on Saturday, April 8, 10 p.m., and
midnight, at the Vancity Theatre.
Saved by the seder
The closing film of the festival on April 9 is the hip, trippy When
Do We Eat?, in which a large, dysfunctional family comes together
for a traditional seder. A really traditional seder: it's
held in a tent and features lamb roasted on an outdoor spit, just
like in Moses's time.
The purpose of such effort on the part of the normally unobservant
Stuckman clan is that one son, Ethan, has become Chassidic and refuses
to attend a meal that is not 100 per cent kosher. His over-eager
mother, Peggy, is more than happy to oblige; hiring her paramour,
a half-blind Israeli laborer named Rafi, to oversee preparations.
Witnessing Ethan's ministrations over the mezzuzah, Rafi asks him,
"Are you one of those religious assholes who think they're
too good for the army?" "Sorry," Ethan replies sincerely,
"I don't speak Hebrew."
Rounding out the family are irascible father Ira, who for years
has run a business making Christmas ornaments, paranoid grandfather
Artur, stoner Zeke, autistic Lionel, sex worker Nikki, half-sister
Jennifer and her black, Christian girlfriend Grace – plus saucy
publicist cousin Vanessa, whose ever-present cellphone plays "Hallelujah."
Got it?
Ira has little patience with Ethan – who he sees as a bum –
or for his newfound religiosity. (Nor does brother Zeke, who, in
response to being told, "Food is a miracle; really taste it!"
retorts: "It's friggin' parsley!") Ira just wants to get
the night over with – "I run the world's fastest seder,"
he declares. But things don't turn out quite as planned – especially
after Zeke gives his father a tab of ecstasy. Suddenly, all the
lines between the warring family become blurred; confessions are
made and the entire evening takes on an aura of mysticism. "Better
buckle up, dad," Zeke warns – as Jennifer tells her father,
who's ignored her for years, in favor of his second family: "I
don't need a drug hug."
Ultimately – and despite the Stuckmans' protests – it's
the non-Jewish, kippah-clad Grace who brings everyone back together
under the banner of Jewish tradition. For all its black humor, When
Do We Eat? is really about the unshakeable bonds of family.
This first film from director Salvador Litvak stars Lesley Ann Warren
as Peggy, Barton Fink's Michael Lerner as Ira and Jack Klugman
as Artur.
When Do We Eat? screens on Sunday, April 9, 7 p.m., at the
Norman Rothstein Theatre.
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