Sarah Silverman on the couch

While Your Mayor makes no claims of being a seasoned psychiatrist, that does not prevent me from hereby offering just a couple of friendly words of advice to Jimmy Kimmel: Yes, your girlfriend is the funniest, sexiest comic working right now, but for God’s sake, man, slowly back away now.

Kimmel, of course, dates Sarah Silverman, whose new Comedy Central series debuts tonight. Silverman, however, seems to be in denial over the identity of her paramour.

Here are a few excerpts from Ms. Silverman’s recent press conference at TV press tour:

* “I always say, like, ‘All I get to play are these bitches in movies, the bitchy girlfriend or the bitchy roommate or the girlfriend before he realizes what love could be.’ And, like, I hate that so much. And my boyfriend is, like, ‘Yeah, but then you get a chance to do your own thing, and you play a bitch.’ But to me, it's so different because it's a much more layered character. There's something to her.�

Seasoned Psychiatric Evaluation: Note that Silverman doesn’t mention Kimmel by name. This could just be Silverman being coy, or it could mask an underlying hostility that Kimmel is making the big-time broadcast-network bucks, while she toils away for a basic-cable station. Furthermore, Silverman is correcting her boyfriend in public, suggesting that though his analysis of her professional plight may seem reasoned, in fact he doesn’t really understand her. This public scolding can only serve as a seismic psychic event that will rend rifts into chasms and leave hearts fractured in the rubble.

* “My boyfriend is always like, ‘You waste so much time, valuable hours in the day having lunch with your friends, where you could be doing something productive.’ And I'm like, ‘But it's one of the things that makes my life so rich and happy.’�

Seasoned Psychiatric Evaluation: Once again, Silverman declines to concede to Kimmel his true essence, once again reducing him to the generic template of a romantic notion. The first time could be considered coyness; the second time can only be attributed to a seething rage that, in this case, seems to stem from Kimmel’s Jake LaMotta-like refusal to acknowledge that Silverman is allowed to actually enjoy her life. And again, the fact that Silverman points up Kimmel’s seeming thoughtlessness and barely repressed urge to run her life in a public forum can only inspire questions of their dysfunctional behavior in private.

* “Jimmy makes one cameo appearance that if you blink you will miss it. He plays Joan the Dispatcher in a party scene for Jay's birthday. Jay (Johnston) plays a policeman who goes out with Laura (Silverman, Sarah's real-life sister). And it's his birthday party, and Jimmy has one line that he says to Brian (Posehn) by the punch bowl -- two, actually. He says, as the camera pans, you just see him and he's dressed as a woman, but it's very not tranny-ish. It's very like a woman's short haircut, very little makeup. And he says, ‘They call me Joan the Dispatcher because there's another Joan in accounting.’ And Brian goes, ‘Huh.’ And he takes a beat, and then he improvised, ‘You're tall.’ That's it. But it's very sweet.�

Seasoned Psychiatric Evaluation: It wasn’t until the final question of the press conference that Silverman actually mentioned Kimmel by name. And then, it was to boast about how she has emasculated him, by dressing him up as a woman and giving him precious little screen time on her show. The only way she could have been crueler and more cutting was to add, “But he wasn’t very funny, so we left his scene on the cutting-room floor.�

So, Jimmy: Get out now. This is for your own good. I promise you: I have no ulterior motives.

- "The Sarah Silverman Program:" 10:30 tonight and midnight Friday on Comedy Central.