Film review: 'Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic'
Book review: I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight
Above: Sarah Silverman in her hilarious stand-up comedy concert film "Jesus Is Magic." Below: Margaret Cho, shown on the cover of her new book, desperately needs to get her groove back.
Sarah Silverman is the new Margaret Cho
I love Margaret Cho. Her politics are right; she sticks up for the underdog, which also means that she's gay-friendly, which doesn't hurt; and her stand-up concert film "Notorious C.H.O." had me in stitches.
Then, I saw her live here in Sacramento. We were a guinea-pig audience for her "Revolution" tour. Unfortunately, we did not pay guinea-pig admission, but paid full admission for a very uneven show. (I remember one joke, about her having to defecate while on a long road trip, that went on way too long and wasn't funny, just juvenile and scatological.) I didn't bother to see her "Revolution" concert film, because I'd been part of the test group and I wasn't impressed then. The gay black comedian who opened for her, Bruce Daniels, was funnier than she was, and it struck me that Margaret just hadn't put enough time between "Notorious" and "Revolution." You have to live a little, experience a little between stand-up tours, it seems to me, in order to gather fresh material.
I thought that I'd give Margaret a second chance -- she's had plenty of time to gather fresh material -- and so I bought the audio version of her new book, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight. She reads her own book, and I figured that hearing her read it might give me that kind of "Notorious C.H.O." feeling again.
I was mistaken.
Admittedly, I'm only partway through I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, but I can say, confidently, that Margaret has pretty much run out of material.
In I Have Chosen Margaret talks mostly about liberal politics, but she says little that is novel or that she hasn't said before, and while I agree with her constant complaint that Asians and Asian-Americans in the United States are pretty much invisible, she never, to my knowledge, divulges that the 2000 U.S. census put Asians at 3.6 percent of the population, compared to 75.1 percent white, 12.5 percent Latino, 12.3 percent black, and 0.9 percent Native American. (Indeed, Native Americans are far more invisible to the average American than are Asians; and they don't even have their own Margaret Cho! And while Asians immigrated voluntarily to the United States, the Native Americans were invaded, occupied and decimated.)
My point is that if we hear about, hear from and see blacks and Latinos more than we do about Asian-Americans, that's in no small part because there are a lot more blacks and Latinos than there are Asian-Americans, and again, the Native Americans, it seems to me, have it a lot worse off than do Asian-Americans, although let's not make this a misery contest...
And that many, if not most, Asians and Asian-Americans seem to have a culturally ingrained non-assertiveness also contributes to their apparent invisibility in the United States. Compare Asian-Americans' assertiveness, for instance, to that of blacks'.
And Margaret Cho seems to want to have it both ways: In I Have Chosen she both says that she wants to be considered first an American, not an Asian or an Asian-American, and she tirelessly emphasizes all things Asian and Asian-American at the same time. She seems confused -- which is understandable, being that she is of a different race in a society that was, according to the last census, three-fourths white -- but her confusion infuses her book.
And, although I'm a flaming liberal, I'll say it: Constant whining about your victimization, real and/or imagined, gets old and tired and boring.
I don't go around constantly whining about how as a gay man I am a second-class citizen because if I wanted to get legally married to another man I couldn't. Don't get me wrong; that we fags pay our taxes, contribute to the economy and compose bitchin' showtunes but do not have equal rights under the United States Constitution is some seriously fucked-up shit. That "President" Bush talks incessantly about forcing "freedom" and "democracy" down the Iraqi people's throat at gunpoint while we could use a lot more freedom and democracy here at home is galling.
But not for a second do I think that anyone wants to hear me go on and on and on about the fact that being gay or lesbian is what Randi Rhodes calls "the new black" -- that is, while overt racism is frowned upon in most circles, it's still open season on gay men and lesbians -- and the way I deal with the injustice is to support, with my votes and with my dollars, those politicians who believe that the U.S. Constitution guarantees equal rights for all (hint: they're not Repugnicans). And, of course, I blog on gay topics, but I don't post "poor me" pieces.
And Bill Maher would back me up on this new rule: Margaret Cho may no longer mention her canceled ABC sitcom.
She's still talking about her canceled 1994 sitcom, "All-American Girl." I'm only partway through I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight but she's mentioned it several times and I'm assuming that she's going to mention it several more times.
She got to use her canceled-sitcom experience in I'm the One That I Want (both in the book and in the stand-up concert film) and in "Notorious C.H.O.," but by now, that new rule that I just mentioned should be in full effect.
I won't tell Margaret to "get over it" or to "move on." I hate it when people say those things, because by "Get over it" and "Move on" they usually mean, "I don't want to hear about your problems" and/or "You should just repress everything and pretend that everything is OK, like I dysfunctionally do."
But memo to Margaret: People plunk down their hard-earned cash to hear new, fresh material, not regurgitated shit.
I'm sorry that your sitcom got canceled after one season. The vast majority of us will never get our own sitcom. The majority of us have been screwed by The Man, too. And when we go on and on about the same old scars, we become boring people. We're allowed to be boring people -- but not if we're paid entertainers.
In I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, Margaret even compares the fact that "All-American Girl" has yet to be released on DVD to the fact that the internment of the Japanese during World War II for the most part has been swept under the rug.
Margaret, I tell you as someone who loves your shit that you have lost perspective, and that you need to put some sort of closure on your canceled sitcom -- it was 10 years ago, after all -- if you truly want to be funny again.
It might not be fair to compare I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight to her stand-up concert films, but Margaret Cho has made her name through comedy, and if you're expecting I Have Chosen to be hilarious, you're going to be disappointed. Margaret doesn't have to be funny all of the time; she's allowed to be serious and political. I love it, in fact, that she is political. But I really, really wish that she'd stop talking about her canceled sitcom and get her groove back.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so into the comedy vacuum that Margaret Cho has left has been sucked Sarah Silverman, whose concert film "Jesus Is Magic" I saw today.
If it's playing where you live, I recommend it; if it isn't, catch it when it comes to DVD.
My first thought about Silverman is: Where in the hell has she been? (Actually, she's been around for a while, having appeared on TV and in movies, but she's still fairly unknown.)
In "Jesus Is Magic" the wildly talented Silverman takes no prisoners as she attacks about every sacred P.C. cow imaginable: blacks, Jews, Christians, Asians, Latinos, the elderly, "little people," gays -- pretty much everyone gets it in her stand-up routine.
While Margaret Cho takes the role of the victim, Silverman takes the role of the victimizer, and it works, I think, because many, if not most of us, whether we would admit it or not, would rather be the victimizer than the victim. (I'm not saying that that's right; I'm saying what the truth appears to be to me.)
The stand-up Sarah Silverman, the obliviously-bigoted-from-privilege Sarah Silverman, however, isn't the real Sarah Silverman, but is a character, which some people won't get. Silverman's comedic genius is to condense all of the ugliest thoughts of American society into one stand-up comedy act, and when we laugh at her horribly politically incorrect jokes, it's in order for us to get that societal poison out of our systems. Silverman is incredibly cathartic.
Some won't get this and they'll condemn Silverman for being crass and being uber-un-P.C. I mean, she jokes about AIDS, the Holocaust, 9/11, who killed Jesus Christ, and even starving children in Africa with distended abdomens, for Christ's sake.
If I believed for a second that Silverman actually believed any of the words that come from her mouth during her stand-up routine, I would not find her funny, but repulsive.
But she's fucking funny, and that's the litmus for a stand-up concert film: Whether or not it makes you laugh.
Watching "Jesus Is Magic" was like watching "Notorious C.H.O.": I laughed constantly and loudly and didn't much give a shit if this bothered anyone in the audience around me, because they should have been laughing constantly and loudly, too (several of us in the audience were, but there are always some zombies in the audience who don't react to even the funniest shit, and you have to wonder why the fuck they paid to see a comedy when they seem congenitally unable to laugh).
Anyway, watching Sarah Silverman today was like watching a Margaret Cho who had gotten her groove back, and I think that I really needed that.
Some of jokes in "Jesus Is Magic" fall flat -- the stagehand jacking himself off, for instance, falls into that unfunny juvenile and scatological category that I was talking about -- but Silverman's hits far exceed her misses, and I look forward to her next film.
My grades:
'Jesus Is Magic': A
I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight: C
8:59:45 PM 
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