QUIET DEPRAVITY.(Sarah Silverman )

The comedian Sarah Silverman exerts a kind of mesmeric control over an audience. She doesn't laugh at her own jokes, and when she smiles it is deliberately inappropriate. The expression that lingers on her face is usually one of tentative confusion or of chipper self-satisfaction, as if she had finished her homework and cleaned up her room, and were waiting for a gold star. "I'm just sensitive," she says onstage. "My skin is paper thin. People don't realize it, because I'm sassy and I'm brassy, but I just-- I see these care commercials with these little kids with the giant bellies and the flies, and these are one- and two-year-old babies, nine months pregnant, and it breaks my heart in two."

As the audience reacts, she presses on. "It breaks my heart in half. And I don't give money, because"--out of the side of her mouth--"I don't want them to spend it on drugs, but I give. You know I give. I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors--expecting nothing, by the way--and they culled their money together, whatever they call it, and bought a stamp and sent me a postcard thanking me, and it said thank you and that they had enough sweaters for every single member of the village to get one and that they were delicious."

Silverman is thirty-four and coltish, with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion. Her arms are long and her center of gravity is low: she is five feet seven, and moves like a vervet monkey. Onstage, she is beguilingly calm. She speaks clearly and decorously. "Quiet depravity" is how Michael McKean, who was with her in the cast of "Saturday Night Live" (she was a writer and a featured player for the 1993-94 season), describes her demeanor. The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view: "I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because--I'm Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic--it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn through my skin it will protect me." In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: "They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don't want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it's a lie." Her constructions are minimal but the turn is sharp. "I was raped by a doctor," she says. "Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."

Comedy is probably the last remaining branch of the arts whose suitability for women is still openly discussed. Several years ago, Jerry Lewis, then in his early seventies, reportedly told an audience at the Aspen Comedy Festival that he didn't much care for female comedians and couldn't think of one who was any good. Lewis's views were criticized in public but upheld by some, in modified form, in private. "When you went home alone and did the math, he was just kind of right," Penn Jillette, the magician-comedian, says. "I mean, what passes for funny in women is, like, Lucille Ball, who was never funny." Lewis apologized in a press release--he praised Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett--and later clarified his position on "Larry King Live": "I said, 'Some women comedians make me uncomfortable,' because a man comedian can do anything he wants and I'm not offended by it. But we're talking about a God-given miracle, who produces a child. I have a difficult time seeing her do this onstage."

Phyllis Diller, whom Jillette, too, regards as funny, dispensed with the gender thing by wearing a wig and silly boots and gloves and telling jokes about how ugly she was. "I came out as a clown," she says. "A clown is androgynous. They didn't worry if I was a man or a woman." Moms Mabley, safely old by the time she entered mainstream comedy, joked about her taste for young men; Roseanne Barr was a stout blue-collar "domestic goddess"; Margaret Cho says she is a "fag hag." Silverman presents herself as approachable though deranged, a sort of twisted Gracie Allen, and she never breaks character. She talks about herself so ingenuously that you can't tell if she is the most vulnerable woman in the world or ...