This Slate piece on Sarah Silverman gets a number of interesting, fairly subtle things very right:
Silverman's work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game ofcontemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatilegeneralizing about our moral right to generalize. But she's not just acritic of PC culture: She's a connoisseur. She handles the complexalgorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, usingwhat terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews forkilling Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'mone of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The jokeexposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but theabsurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes arethought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "Iwant to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having troubleconceiving." A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered "Faggot"—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.[...]
Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important memberof a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the"meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.
