Watch Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles For Free

How sad is this?

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

We Are Miracles was only the second show that I watched from Sarah Silverman. It wasn't bad at all, good enough to watch at least once. I preferred the Jesus Is Magic show though. Her jokes are always a bit sarcastic and very daring and that's a good thing. Her material in this show isn't that much more different than in the other show that I saw from her, I guess it's her signature for her sense of humor. To me the show could just be the stand-up-comedy itself, without the intro and song that is also in this show. Not only is Sarah Silverman candy for the eye, but she's also funny and what else is more important in a woman than her looks? Sarah Silverman is a woman many men dream of and that's a compliment to her.

I first learned of Sarah Silverman when I saw ads for "The Sarah Silverman Program" in 2007 or 2008.* I then saw some of her skits and laughed out loud. Her HBO special "Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles" features her in the Largo telling all manner of edgy stories. I particularly liked Silverman's memory of being in the shower with her mom. It just goes to show that humor really does work best when the person is allowed to say whatever s/he wants. Above all, Silverman is among the best that there is in comedy, always letting everyone have it equally.*I later learned that she co-starred in "Bulworth", "There's Something About Mary" and "Evolution", all of which I had seen years earlier.

Sarah Silverman is a comedian that's always been around, but an artist I never directly got into by chance. I watched a few episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program, which was too obscure for my taste. But I always enjoyed her cameo in Judd Apatow's Funny People, Louie and thought she gave an effective supporting performance in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz. I enjoyed clips of her standup online, but have not seen her perform a complete comedy hour till now.The decision to shoot the special at the Largo Comedy Club in front of 39 people is a great one. Silverman never looks far off into the distance or above to a balcony booth. There's no big giant TV screen of her in the background for the cheap seats. The intimacy of the Largo lends itself for Silverman's raunchy off-the-wall random tangent comedy, giving her much more freedom to roam from topic to topic without transitions. "I don't need segue ways." Silverman quips, "The brain doesn't work that way."Some of the joke highlights were a childhood story of how her older sister used to scare her, sin atonement in Christianity and a bit about the Make A Wish foundation. It's nice how much politically incorrect jokes she gets away with, showing an affable innocent girly persona can really go a long way to make hard topics durable.The whole experience is more akin to a live show, as Silverman is able to milk laughs from silences and even counter critique audience reactions when they aren't up to par. It's always awkward when comedians do audience interaction in big theater shows and this completely fixes that. The reactions from the 39 people create a more potent, immersive connection to Silverman's perspective. And making 39 people laugh, after all, is much harder than making 200 people laugh.

I didn't discover Silverman until her Comedy Central show and then, of course, realized she'd been around for a while. I'll say upfront I'm a fan so when I saw this was coming out I was really looking forward to it. Well, I loved it. Silverman's insightful, crude, awkwardly shocking, highly structured approach to comedy always gives me a bucket of LOLs. Like Louis CK she approaches some subjects with the intent to disturb. 911, rape jokes, gang bangs, etc. are not meant to make you go "it's funny because it's true!" Rather they're kind of ushering a meta level where the spin is "It's funny because it's AWWWWKward." Anyway, her choice to film in a small venue adds an intimacy and texture that makes the special stand out from most other HBO specials and if you like funny, insightful comics, Tivo it.