NEW YORK (AP) — Fans of Sarah Silverman will quickly recognise the character she plays on her new Comedy Central series.To start with, the character is called Sarah. Furthermore, this particular Sarah continues the tradition of winsome depravity long embraced by the humorist-actress who shares her name.

During years of stand-up comedy, TV appearances and film roles, Silverman has mined laughs from 9/11, AIDS, the Holocaust, rape and Martin Luther King, among other topics that most comics leave safely buried.

Now "The Sarah Silverman Program" (which premiered last night and airs each Thursday at 11.30 Bermuda time) gives a fresh twist to her freewheeling wrongness in the person of a flighty, self-consumed slacker.

Sarah's response to a lengthy TV benefit for children with leukaemia? She rousts herself from the couch to go buy fresh batteries for her remote ... so she can change the channel.

A farting contest with her friends has an unfortunate outcome for Sarah. Subsequently granted any wish by God, she requests ... a better fart.

Last night, Sarah got drunk on cough syrup and crashed her car into a playground. But not before snubbing an elderly woman at the drug store for looking old ... just moments after praising the woman's youthful appearance.

This is the sort of mindbending behaviour Sarah makes a practice of, inflicting whiplash on anyone who crosses her path — including the audience.

"I don't think anybody's gonna say, 'Oh, she's a good person'," Silverman acknowledges with a smile.

But the funny, often shocking thing about Silverman's show is: You are drawn to the character, however appalling, even as she pushes you away with a rude shove.

This is Silverman's specialty. After all, she is the comic who in her stand-up act tells the crowd, "I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin."

Silverman's comedy has always been based on saying the opposite of what she feels, in the service of exposing buried truths about prejudice, pettiness or sundry other wrong-headed attitudes.

Then again, maybe not.

"I don't know if it's like: Hey, we're all thinking this, and now I'm saying it," she muses.

Struggling to explain, she seems genuinely torn as to how much meaning to give what she does. She looks downright squeamish at sounding pretentious. Maybe it all comes down to a single word, a less polite version of "jerk" (and her only salty word in the whole interview).

"I think it could be more like: I'm clearly the (jerk) in this scenario," she says, "and if it's making you laugh, that's enough."

Arriving downstairs from her Manhattan hotel room, Silverman bounds into the lobby in baggy Bermudas, a short-sleeved jersey and tennis shoes. A tiny pack is on her back, her hair pulled into a ponytail.

She looks like a schoolgirl ready to dash for the bus — and, wearing no makeup, little more than half her 36 years. Settling in for this lunch chat, she asked to borrow a page from the reporter's pad. She needed to dispose of her gum.

"Sarah's a pathetic person," Silverman declares. "Her parents are dead, she has nothing going on in her life, and she's really dependent on her sister." Played by real-life sister Laura Silverman, that character is, fittingly, a nurse, whose care even includes paying jobless Sarah's bills.

Brian Posehn and Steve Agee as Sarah's gay-couple neighbours round out her support system. Or would they all be better described as enablers? Is Sarah some kind of tragicomic victim?

A poignant subtext to the show would suit Silverman fine.

"I always am drawn to heartbreak," she says. Oh, yeah? If this were a scene on her TV show, here's her wind-up for a verbal sucker punch. But wait, she's not kidding. "I love heartbreaking music, heartbreaking movies," she says, her bright eyes moist, "and I think there's an element of that" in her series.

Having come out as, of all things, a softie, she mentions her boyfriend of four-and-a-half years, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, about whom she's always "playing out a tragedy in my head".

"To appreciate people in your life the most, you kind of have to eulogise them while they're living. And in order to do that you have to constantly imagine them dying tragically. I think I do that beyond my control," she says, laughing at herself.

In candid, often playful, conversation between bites of an omelet, Silverman applauds her current anti-depressant.

"It's been really good," she reports, clearly pleased. "I'm not paralysed with despair by, like, 'Should I do my laundry now? I'll just have more in a week!'"

She also addresses, with an embarrassed smile, the oft-broached topic of her sexiness.

"I never know how to answer those questions," she says. "But the day those questions stop, I'll know I've hit a wall. So it's troubling on so many levels."

And she sizes up her career to date, which, on her new series, finds her playing someone who seduces, then jilts, none other than God. Such a bad girl!

"I do this character because I'm into it right now," says Silverman. But that doesn't mean she's forever wedded to finding humour in what she calls "the more graphic parts of reality.

"I watch '30 Rock', it's my favourite new show. It's soooo funny. So I don't feel like, 'Hey, you can't be cool and be on a broadcast network'.

"I think I have the leeway to change any way I want, whatever I'm into," she says, looking ahead.

Still, never fear that Sarah Silverman will land the starring role on a spin-off of "According to Jim".

"Even in school, I was well liked," she says, "but I always stayed on the periphery. And that's my plan."