Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Dressed in a short black sheath dress and swigging occasionally from a bottle of wine, she stood onstage telling a story about her college days: the time she woke up in an alcoholic haze and realized there was a strange guy between her legs, going down on her. What concerned Schumer, looking back at this moment, wasn’t the horror of blacking out and losing control of her body, but the olfactory ordeal this guy was going through. Having hooked the crowd with her body shame, she then flipped it into the stand-up version of a teachable moment.

  “Men are not raised to hate themselves,” Schumer told the audience. “They are raised to think everything that comes out of them is a miracle! Guys never ask, ‘Did it taste okay?’ ” she said, voice high and squeaky in mock mortification. The women in the seats around me at the arena laughed appreciatively. The men seemed to squirm a little.

  The goddess of grossness, Amy Schumer is in the vanguard of an ever-edgier strand of confessional female humor. It’s a genre fed by a decade of women’s intimate memoirs and online essays that replaced private consciousness-raising with public self-disclosure. Consciousness-raising emerged out of the women’s movement’s drive to “tell it like it is.” Pioneered by radical feminists in the late sixties, consciousness-raising groups proliferated in the seventies: women opened up about their private lives in order to draw broader political conclusions from their own experiences. So women asked themselves questions such as: Are you a “nice girl”? Have you had an abortion? What does it mean to you to earn your own money? When did you first notice you were treated differently from boys? Do you ever feel invisible?

  Forty years later, these questions still vibrated under the surface of pop culture made by women. But the emphasis shifted: rather than vigilance over the way that behavior, relationships, and desires were all linked to structures of control and conditioning, the impetus now was a carnivalesque fuck-you to double standards—specifically, the way that male mischief was seen as cool and wild, whereas women behaving badly were seen as pathetic and out of control. Lena Dunham and friends flaunted their imperfect bodies and messy lives on Girls; Edie Falco popped pills as Nurse Jackie; Mindy Kaling tested the audience’s tolerance for unlikable women on The Mindy Project; and the roommates of 2 Broke Girls spouted dialogue that was so smutty, viewers complained to the FCC. There were so many trend pieces about these new “funny women” of TV that actresses began complaining about being asked what it was like to be a funny woman on TV.

  One place you would not find many funny women, strangely enough, was on the cable channel specifically designed to make you laugh. For much of the network’s history, Comedy Central’s programming felt like a giant bro bubble, something that only got worse with its 2011 rebranding, which focused on luring in tech-savvy eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old men. But as an increasing number of cable competitors such as FX, IFC, and TBS targeted that same demographic with their own quirky comedies, Comedy Central began to look for new ways to expand its audience.

  The result was an estrogen infusion: the 2013 premieres of Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City. Both shows revolved around women who didn’t seem the least bit concerned about propriety. Bodily fluids, casual sex, farting, and getting drunk and stoned were a few of their favorite things. Schumer and Broad City creators Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson embodied a new kind of feminism: foulmouthed, physical, and filthy.

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  Early in life, Amy Schumer learned how to use her body to provoke a reaction. Once, when a high school teacher wouldn’t let her leave the class to go to the bathroom, she loudly announced, “That’s cool, Mr. Simons. I’ll just stay here, even though I can feel my period blood leaking out of my vagina and about to seep through my pants and onto my chair.” As Schumer writes in her memoir, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, making people laugh “dismantled the power structure within seconds.” Her favorite children’s book was Eloise, a cosmopolitan fairy tale about a little girl left to her own devices who wreaks havoc on the genteel aristocrats of the Plaza Hotel.

  Born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Schumer lived in relative luxury (if not quite Eloise-level wealth), until it all fell apart: her parents lost their business, they divorced, and her dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and became an alcoholic. Schumer’s persona as a tough-talking blue-collar chick was forged during those bumpy later childhood years on Long Island. She sometimes tells an anecdote about the time her dad pooped in his pants while they were at an amusement park. One of several involuntary defecation stories, it suggests Schumer learned to make grotesque trauma bearable through humor. After high school, with aspirations of being a serious actress, she left home to study theater at Towson University in Baltimore.

  It was during a women’s studies class at Towson that Schumer first encountered feminist ideas, specifically the concept of the male gaze coined by theorist Laura Mulvey that would later be absorbed by Lena Dunham and other forward-thinking TV writers and directors. Schumer wrote a paper on the effect of the male gaze in movies and books such as Madame Bovary, analyzing the way it framed women as passive, erotic objects rather than active participants. “It was pretty sophisticated for somebody who was just getting blackout drunk every night,” she tells me, chuckling quietly at her younger train-wreck self. “I delivered my thesis, and I was shaking from being so hungover, and the professor thought I was nervous. I was just really interested in how every movie we were seeing was this kind of slow pan from the shoe to the woman’s upper thigh.”

  After graduation, Schumer studied acting and cofounded New York City theater company The Collective. She also made her first forays into stand-up comedy, joking her way to fourth place on the reality show Last Comic Standing in 2007. This led to a tour with the other top contestants (all older men) and then stints on a variety of low-level TV shows. Schumer’s second major break didn’t come until 2011: She pitched material in the hope of writing for Comedy Central’s Charlie Sheen roast but, instead, was invited to perform on the dais with Mike Tyson, William Shatner, and Jackass star Steve-O. The network recognized Schumer’s disruptive talent, the distinct cognitive dissonance between her cute blond appearance and her potty mouth. She made headlines at the roast with her vicious riff on Steve-O, whose costar Ryan Dunn had recently died in an accident: “I know you must have been thinking, It could have been me, and I know we were all thinking, Why wasn’t it?” The joke attracted a ton of media attention and even some death threats. This was just a taste of the hate to come.

  At thirty-one, Schumer recorded the Comedy Central special Mostly Sex Stuff. Onstage at San Francisco’s Fillmore, with her shiny blond hair, apple cheeks, and baby doll minidress, she fired off raunchy jokes about dating in her persona of a bubbly, slutty white girl. “I finally just slept with my high school crush,” she said sweetly. “But I swear, now like he expects me to go to his high school graduation. Like I know where I’m going to be in three years!” Responding to some members of the audience who looked startled at the pedophilia joke, she assured them she would never have sex with kids, then interrupted herself: “I shouldn’t say never! You don’t know.” Of the decision to call the special Mostly Sex Stuff, Schumer told NPR’s Terry Gross, “I didn’t grow up hearing any women really delving into that side of themselves, and so I thought, Okay, maybe I can be this person for women and for men just to hear the woman’s perspective in, you know, a less apologetic, honest way.”

  Comedy Central offered Schumer a deal to make a pilot of whatever kind of show she wanted—a rare offer for a relative unknown. “Comedy Central hinted at the fact that there was a hole in late night at the time and that maybe they might be looking for something that had a kind of Chelsea Lately vibe [invoking the comedian Chelsea Handler’s popular late-night show on E!], a studio-based talk show kind of thing,” says Dan Powell, who was brought in to produce the pilot. That didn’t exactly interest Schumer; she dreamed of making a boundary-stretching sketch series that played on her acting and stand-up skills. Yet Schumer had seen many pre
vious projects fall through, and figured this one was doomed because, as she says with a sigh, “Comedy Central was such a boys’ club. I just wanted to get some money for the pilot and then focus on doing a show somewhere else that seemed more possible.”

  Just hours before she had to present the network with details about the show, she went out for drinks with Jessi Klein, a comedian and former Comedy Central executive. Shocked that Schumer seemed all set to squander the carte-blanche opportunity offered by Comedy Central, Klein urged her to think boldly. What would Amy Schumer’s dream show look like?

  “Amy texted me late at night after talking to Jessi and said, ‘Scrap the treatment we have! I want to make my Louie!’ ” says Powell. The first person they hired for Inside Amy Schumer was Klein, who became head writer.

  As the show developed, Klein says, “A lot of sketches fell into two categories. There was Amy as a ‘monster’ version of herself and Amy as a ‘victim’ version of herself. Those were two comedic poles we bounced around. We were just constantly trying to think: What are the things from her stand-up and from knowing her that just felt most . . . Amy? How do we make the show feel like her?”

  Some of the earliest sketches involved the dichotomy between male expectations of women and the drab reality of female existence. In “Sexting,” Amy sits on her couch in cat pajamas eating pasta with her hands and texting a guy. He wants to talk dirty, asking what she’d like him to do to her. She bluntly responds with lines like “Tell me I’m safe in my apartment.” After he informs her that he’s ejaculated, she returns to shoveling spaghetti into her mouth and watching a rom-com. “I thought, Oh, these are little moments from a woman’s point of view that are so relatable to women—and, I think, to everybody—but I hadn’t seen anybody really do it,” says Klein.

  When asked which early sketch best conveyed what she wanted to do, Schumer giggles and mentions “Third Date,” in which a woman (played by Schumer) goes out on her third date with a guy. After telling him she’s ready to sleep with him, he mentions he has AIDS. “We just played out truthfully how it would go if a guy, on the third date, told you he had AIDS,” Schumer says. “It’s such an awful thing to think about and could be deemed insensitive but . . . what would this look like if it happened? I think there’s room for comedy there.”

  Schumer is riveted by things that make other people shudder. Even when she was a schoolgirl, she says, “When I was in class or whatever, I always thought, What is the worst thing I could say right now? What would ruin this moment and this time for everyone?” She likes to play with that part of her character—“that girl, who would say the most annoying thing, you know?”

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  Once Comedy Central ordered a full season of Inside Amy Schumer, the question became: how do you create a successful comedy show from a female perspective on a network watched mainly by dudes? In 2012, 65 percent of the network’s audience skewed male, with a median age of twenty-nine. Not only that, but Inside Amy would be following Tosh.0, a snarky compendium of Internet video clips hosted by Daniel Tosh, a comedian specializing in ironic frat-boy humor. It was the top show that year in prime time among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old men.

  “At first, we were like, ‘How do we suck in the guys that watch Tosh?’ ” Schumer asks. “Someone told me our show was the equivalent of putting shaved carrots into brownies so kids will eat them,” she says, echoing Tina Fey’s comparison of sneaking feminism onto SNL to Jessica Seinfeld’s recipe for spinach hidden in brownies. “Yeah, in that first season, we didn’t necessarily say what we wanted to say.” For Schumer and her team, the brownie was sex, a reliable lure to the dudes out there. But mixed in was always a little bit of mind-nourishing feminism (the shredded carrot/spinach element). The “2 Girls 1 Cup” sketch, for instance, follows Schumer’s ordinary-girl character as she goes on a casting call for the notorious shock-porn video that involves two women pooping in a cup, eating it, and then vomiting into each other’s mouths. She remains unruffled as the director lists the ways Schumer will have to debase herself, not least of which is that she has to lose weight—“mainly in the face.”

  In another sketch, she announces pleasantly, “I’m Amy Schumer, and I’m proud to say I’m a feminist. That’s why I’m hosting my very own gang bang.” Standing in her own living room, she watches queasily as a horde of average Joes shuffles in, prepared to pound her. “I was in a phase of watching a lot of porn, and I thought, That would just suck,” Schumer says, dragging out her consonants like a Valley girl. “What if you went [to a gang bang] and you’re just not in the mood? I would never really want any porn or fantasies I have to really happen, which is very different than men, who I think would very much like them to happen.”

  Some of the most original Inside Amy sketches didn’t involve men at all, focusing instead on the mind games women play with themselves and one another. In “Compliments,” a bunch of young female friends converge on an East Village street and flatter each other in passing. “Look at your cute little dress!” one says enthusiastically. “Little?” the other replies sarcastically. “I’m like a size one hundred now. . . . Anyway, I paid like two dollars for it.” The deflected compliments escalate into a self-abasement circle jerk, until finally a friend passes by and they all coo over her jacket. She thanks them—and the shock is so severe, the friends all lose their minds and commit suicide on the spot. As Schumer told A.V. Club, “One of the things women are taught is that it makes you more attractive when you hate yourself. To be accused of having any sort of an ego is really frowned upon.”

  “Compliments” was the first Inside Amy sketch to go viral, but it would be far from the last. Klein says, “When we were writing it, I thought, Oh yeah, this is what women spend seventy percent of our day doing with each other. How has this not been written about before?” That became their modus operandi going forward: find moments in women’s lives that hadn’t been exposed to the light and “take them to the point of absurdity,” while keeping the emotional reality intact.

  As the tone of the show cohered, Klein had an epiphany: “We are in charge and we can write about whatever we want, even if it seems like a really marginal female experience. There are so many things that, on another sketch show, you might not even have had the guts to pitch. Because there’s a sense that if men won’t get it, it’s not worth doing.”

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  On April 30, 2013, Inside Amy premiered to three million viewers. Comedy Central’s most-watched debut of the year, it topped its time slot in the male eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic. Comedy Central president Kent Alterman praised Schumer in Vanity Fair: “She kind of transcends gender—ironically, because a lot of her stuff is about gender. But it’s never alienating.”

  Perhaps it should have been alienating to Comedy Central’s male viewers; sometimes the show took direct aim at them. In the season-two sketch “Focus Group,” a moderator asks a roomful of men if they would watch Inside Amy. “I would bang her, if that’s what you mean!” one guy jeers. A few seasons later, Schumer expanded this idea into one of the series’ masterworks: the episode-long “12 Angry Men,” directed by Schumer. A parody of the classic film, it is shot in black and white. Twelve great character actors (i.e., guys who aren’t leading-man handsome) prowl around a jury room debating a crucial issue: Is Amy Schumer pretty enough to star in a TV show? After hours of deliberation, John Hawkes (wrinkled, beak-nosed) holds up a giant poster of Amy for examination. “Do we really need to look at her again?” seethes Paul Giamatti (balding, puffy). “She’s built like a lineman and she has Cabbage Patch-like features. Her ass makes me furious!” Hawkes asks Vincent Kartheiser (receding hairline, pasty faced) if he might be inspired to masturbate to Schumer if he got drunk and took off his eyeglasses. Kartheiser concedes he might.

  Schumer conceived the “12 Angry Men” idea, and she insisted on writing the torrent of insults herself. Just as Lena Dunham made Hannah Horvath say or do the worst thing as a kind of defensive reflex, Schumer sometim
es seemed intent on imagining the most horrible slurs anyone could say about her (or women generally) and exorcising them.

  “It was really hard, and then it was really empowering,” she says. “I was kind of checking in with myself while I was writing it, like, Am I hurting myself? Is this healthy? It never got to be too much, and I said everything I wanted to say.” She insists there was no masochism at play—or, at least if there was, it was purposeful self-flagellation. “I told them that I would write it on my own because that made it feel like I had control. I didn’t want the writers to come up with new insults I hadn’t thought of myself. And there is nothing about my physical appearance that bothers me. I have days where I feel like I am really gross and I can’t believe that anyone wants to have sex with me, but for the most part, I’m fine.”

  Like “Focus Group,” “12 Angry Men” skewered the entertainment industry, with its male decision makers eagerly courting male audiences. My favorite Inside Amy sketch, “Last Fuckable Day,” takes that critique of Hollywood further. Directed by filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, the season-three sketch stars Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette as themselves—actresses over forty out for a picnic to celebrate Louis-Dreyfus’s waning Hollywood appeal. Klein came up with the idea early in the show’s run, but it took several years to realize because older actresses kept turning them down. It was Holofcener who got the fifty-something Louis-Dreyfus on board, who in turn attracted the other stars.

  Filmed at a bucolic ranch in Southern California, it opens with Schumer innocently stumbling upon the older women carousing in the grass. “Are you that girl from television who talks about her pussy all the time?” Louis-Dreyfus asks her. The older women regale Schumer with some of the telltale signs that an actress’s sell-by date is approaching—for instance, when they cast you to play Tom Hanks’s mother instead of his wife, or when your movie poster features a kitchen and has an uplifting title such as Whatever It Takes or She Means Well.