Almost nothing's off limits for edgy Sarah Silverman.

BACKSTAGE at Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre, the comedian Sarah Silverman is kneeling on the floor of her boyfriend's crowded office, looking rapturously at his image on a flat screen monitor. She is wearing low-slung jeans, a worn navy crewneck sweater over a baseball T-shirt and sneakers. Her silky black hair is pulled into a ponytail. She is very pretty, almost angelic, looking more like a fresh scrubbed college kid than the 34-year-old show biz vet that she is.

On the TV monitor, her boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel, whose late night talk show is taped at the El Capitan, is interviewing Val Kilmer. Silverman loves Kimmel, and loves to talk about how much she loves Kimmel, but right now, she's intrigued by Kilmer, who looks a little puffy onscreen.

"He looks so ... like if you soaked Val Kilmer in water," she says with a quizzical look on her face.

Innocent and apt, unexpected and delivered in a tone of wonder, the tossed-off line is a mild version of Silverman's comedic stock in trade, which will be on full-throated display a couple of hours later during an 18-minute set at The Improv, a few miles away.

There, for a full house, she will roll around on top of a grand piano and punctuate some of her older bits with new material: "I was at a red light and I thought there was an earthquake and my heart was pounding and I realized it was the bass coming from the big Suburban behind me," she will say. "And it made me realize that in years to come, there's going to be a whole generation of elderly deaf black people ... And I do not mean this in a racist way. It tickles me a little bit." Most people laugh, a few groan. But as Silverman is fond of saying, and will repeat later, on stage: "I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin."

After many years of steady work and moderate success, including a traumatizing stint at 22 as a writer and performer for "Saturday Night Live," Silverman appears to be on the brink of something bigger. She has a standout appearance in the dirty joke documentary "The Aristocrats." A movie based on her off-Broadway show, "Jesus Is Magic," directed by Liam Lynch, will have its Los Angeles premiere on Nov. 11. She has just finished shooting a pilot for her own Comedy Central show. And yet, something about all these projects feels disquietingly familiar to Silverman.