Sarah Silverman's stand-up comedy makes for a film more than more often cute than funny, but funny sometimes too.

However, her singing in Jesus is Magic (2005) approaches fingernails-on-blackboard & though even that can be kinda funny, there should've been way less of it. The one exception was her closing rendition of "Amazing Grace" as a kind of Jewish Hillbilly Rock number, with extra voices singinging out of miscellaneous orafices.

The promise that it's "about the holocaust, about AIDs, but it's funny" just about comes to pass. Silverman's straightforward stand-up is by far the best part, approaching hysterical at times, daring, vulgar, & above all funny.

But every time the stand-up is interupted by badly acted sketches or comedy songs & sitcommish life-with-Sarah's-friends bits, it falls to pieces, not least because she has a talentless director who couldn't make up for what she didn't know how to do right. And in every one of these side-bits, the film doesn't regain steam or successful humor until it returns to the straightforward stand-up.

Some of her nastier shtick is downright sicko, in the best way, & Silverman just might be the first honest-to-shit female Lenny Bruce, not that anyone is going to notice in our more broadly vulgar age.

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