Sarah Silverman, Hammersmith Apollo, London

A few days after Jonathan Ross declared her to be the funniest woman in the world – a statement she immediately disproved with her grating performance on his chat show – Sarah Silverman takes to the stage at the sold-out, celebrity-studded Hammersmith Apollo.

Expectations are high for the American comedian, who is famous enough in her homeland to have made it to the cover of Vanity Fair, but in the UK is better known for a few odds and ends: a controversial turn in the comedy film The Aristocrats, a few YouTube songs and a DVD called Jesus Is Magic, which has just been released in the UK, but has been available in the US for three years. As an oeuvre, it's not substantial, but that doesn't stop Silverman from repeating it – some of her jokes are more than three years old. What's worse, she can't even remember them, and makes constant reference to a set list. When she purrs – in that wide-eyed, whiny way of hers – "I was raped by a doctor, which was so bittersweet for a Jewish girl", few people laugh, because it's an old joke. Nor do they when she says: "I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin." It's another oldie, but not a goodie.

It might surprise Silverman to learn that her Jewish Princess persona – who jokes that Hispanic people smell, black people don't tip, vaginas stink of fish and sings "You're going to die" to her grandmother – is rather inoffensive to a British audience used to the high-cringe factor of Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen. Over the pond, South Park has been brilliantly toying with this brand of meta-bigotry for more than a decade, and took it further than Silverman does. It's old news, done badly.

It's not all bad, though. Silverman's attempts to make the word "pussy" sound "more gross" by pronouncing it with a lisp ("puthy") was silly but funny. Her songs often work better than her one-liners, although many of them strike the same insipid, pseudo-racist tone. "I love you more than Jews love money," she trills, "More than Puerto Ricans need baths..." It's far less outrageous than she thinks it is – and I write this as someone who is both Jewish and Latin American.

What's truly offensive, is that Silverman thinks that barely 50 minutes of this drivel is worth £50. Her "encore" – during which people begged for more, while she shrugged and said she had shot her load – was by far, and unintentionally, the funniest moment of the night. "You're overhyped, Sarah!" shouted someone from the circle. With hecklers like these, she wasn't even the funniest woman in the room.