That’s the up side. But the film doesn’t do enough justice to her. The style of her performing involves feigning a casual approach and frequent pausing. On the one hand that can make the material funnier because it seems so contemplative and allows an audience to think about the outrageous line she has just used. But on screen it also often feels like dead time. Tighter editing would have helped.

Although the film is essentially a portrait of two standup performances in California, wrap-around material and inserts are used, some of them effective, some labored. The introduction in which she talks to two friends (one is acted by her sister) and drives to her show falls somewhat flat. But some of the inserts into her act are hilarious, as when she imitates a Jewish porn star, or comes on in sexy garb to sing.

I enjoyed Silverman in “The Aristocrats,” but this film is all her and it provides a chance to see what she is really about. She makes fun of society’s taboos on racist humor, mines jokes from 9/11 by talking about what the day meant to her in the most personally shallow terms, finds humor in the Holocaust, of all things, not out of disrespect, but out of her insistence that no subject is taboo.

She assumes the stance of being the Jewish woman that she is and twits ethnicity. You really can’t very well repeat a Silverman gag, not only because much of it is too filthy or comically racist for print, but because it would fall flat without her very special brand of nonchalant delivery, spiced with grimaces and body language.