The other thing that makes Silverman so funny is the evident craft that goes into her monologues. The trick is not just to say naughty things but to land the joke from an unexpected direction, even moreso than is usual with stand-up routines--Silverman's writing is highly elliptical. After a while you grasp the technique and then the pleasure is increased by anticipation. Silverman and her writers are absolutely tireless at this game; I was able to figure out the joke before she said it only once (and I still laughed). Predictability doesn't by itself kill comedy; in fact, it's part of what makes comedians iconic. Silverman's distinctive craftsmanship gives her comedy an extra dimension of semi-participatory aesthetic enjoyment.

Jesus Is Magic calls up a whole tradition of blue comedy that has long provided a polluted oasis for refugees from "positive," heartwarming, family-friendly entertainment. Like raunchy old Redd Foxx, with his "If you can't Fugg it, Sugg it"-type numbers, Silverman stirs the earth up to give the audience a whiff of what "wholesome" entertainment excludes. And like Lenny Bruce she makes lightning out of the tensions within the audience. If you laugh, the content of any individual joke can suddenly make you conscious of the race, sex, whatever, of the people sitting near you. Silverman is probably more impudent than scandalous--her mincing girlishness may be counterfeit but it keeps her from being out-and-out raw--but her show is liberating in a way that creates tension as much as it relaxes it.

In addition, she's more of an artisan of audience expectations than her forebears. (In his aggressive mode Bruce, by contrast, worked more on their sensitivities.) The action isn't only in what Silverman says--which may involve common stereotypes, crude fantasy, hypocrisy, ridiculous preconceptions, cretinous misunderstanding, tactlessness, or just nonsensical obscenity--but in the way her deceptively winsome demeanor, the sneak-attack structure of the jokes, and her expertly varied timing give added spin to the insanity. This is why, although she's breathtakingly base, she has what Howard Stern lacks--wit.

Altogether Jesus Is Magic is the best live-performance movie since Richard Pryor's Live in Concert (1979) and Bette Midler's Divine Madness (1980). Pryor's routines certainly have more dimension than Silverman's. Listening to his stories is like listening to Bessie Smith's Columbia catalogue, both works of entertainment that offer a panorama of African-American life never so frankly or briskly represented in our culture. And Midler is more of an all-round entertainer than Silverman. (Pryor is, too, for that matter--Silverman doesn't do mimicry and her pantomime is more caricatural than precise.) Jesus Is Magic cuts away from Silverman's stage act for some funny, acted-out vignettes and some musical numbers that are mildly diverting but not special. In Divine Madness Midler is a bawdy dervish determined to send you home entertained to within an inch of your life. Silverman doesn't have Midler's almost homey generosity any more than she has Pryor's scope and reach. But then neither would you expect her to be as ingratiating as Pryor is in his pairings with Gene Wilder and his subsequent concert movies or to be downright schmaltzy as Midler has gotten with her music and such vehicles as Beaches (1988) and For the Boys (1991). (Even the bag-lady routine in Divine Madness itself is bathroom-break time.)