Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Fey was referring to the season-two sketch “A Very Realistic Video Game,” in which Schumer’s clueless character sits with her boyfriend trying out his Call of Duty–style shooter game. After she chooses to play as a “girl soldier,” her avatar is raped in the barracks. The camera stays tight on Schumer’s shocked face as she registers what is happening. The game tries to persuade her not to report the assault. “Are you sure?” it asks. “Did you know he has a family?” The next level of the game is a military trial, where she enters a stage of battle her boyfriend didn’t know existed: a panel of men attack her character. The game is over when the rapist is found guilty—and his commanding officer dismisses the charges.

  “The woman who made rape funny” is probably not something most comedians yearn to see etched on their gravestones, but it’s a topic Schumer returns to again and again. In some ways, it’s the inevitable flip side of her drunken slut persona. Both the alcohol abuse and the sexual assault material emerged to some extent from her own experience. Schumer channeled the boozing into the script for Trainwreck, which was loosely based on her pre-fame life. The nonconsensual sex she chronicles in her memoir: the involuntary loss of her virginity, age seventeen, when her boyfriend penetrated her while she was sleeping. Schumer kept dating him afterward and told no one what had happened to her. She wasn’t even sure how to think about what had happened because it didn’t fit into her preconceived notion of rape (dark alleys, strangers, knifepoint, etc.). Schumer suggests the experience warped her later sexual responses, making her either too guarded or too blasé—“as if the act of sex didn’t matter to me.”

  Rape jokes have long been standard fare in the comedy world; in the summer of 2012, a public discussion arose in response to a stand-up performance by Daniel Tosh at Hollywood’s Laugh Factory. A woman who was in the audience said he responded to her complaint about his rapey humor during the show by goading his audience, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?” After the “girl” in question blogged about the upsetting experience, Tosh’s fellow comedians lined up to defend him. Writer Lindy West weighed in on Jezebel, and later in her book Shrill, arguing that feminists are not just being censorious killjoys when they complain about rape jokes. In a society that shrinks the definition of sexual assault, blames the victim, makes it difficult to report, and rarely convicts perpetrators, telling a rape joke is a distinctly hostile act. And, as West asserts in Shrill, “it reinforces the idea that comedy belongs to men.”

  It was against this backdrop that Schumer made the story of her “gray rape,” or “grape,” a regular part of her stand-up act. She told one reporter she hoped “maybe a guy will hear that joke and know that this isn’t okay . . . And a girl will hear it and feel less alone, because she knows that it happens to other people.”

  Tami Sagher, who joined Schumer’s staff after her stint on Broad City, compares writers’ rooms to dinner parties and says at Inside Amy’s version of the party, “A lot of the conversations would be about feminism. It’s reflective of who Amy is as a person, and how Jessi and Dan and Amy ran that room.” Sometimes they’d find themselves chatting about current events, like the Bill Cosby rape charges. That turned into a segment in which they put the actor on trial; his defense lawyer (played by Schumer) shows the jury a scene from his famous sitcom and asks, “Did anyone feel raped by that? How about drugged? Me, neither. I felt comforted by a familiar father figure.”

  Then there was the 2012 news story about two high school football stars in Steubenville, Ohio, convicted of raping a drunk, unconscious sixteen-year-old girl at a party. Fellow partygoers circulated photos of her naked body on social media; one athlete who was at the party tweeted, “If they’re getting ‘raped’ and don’t resist, then to me it’s not rape. I feel bad for her, but still.” Staff writer Christine Nangle proposed a Steubenville-inspired scenario set in the heartwarming world of TV drama Friday Night Lights, with its beloved high school football coach. The resulting sketch, “Football Town Lights,” features actor Josh Charles as the new coach in town laying down his rules for the players. NO RAPING, he writes on the locker-room whiteboard. Stunned, his players press him for exceptions: “What if my mom is the DA and won’t prosecute?”

  That summer should have been a pinnacle of Schumer’s career. Inside Amy had just finished its third season, with at least half a dozen of its sketches going viral. She had been named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, her face was splashed across the cover of multiple major magazines, and her movie Trainwreck (written by Schumer, and directed and produced by Judd Apatow) had grossed $110 million in the United States. The transformation of Amy Schumer from feminist stand-up comic to international superstar was complete.

  But ten days after the movie’s release, a fifty-nine-year-old white man walked into a theater in Louisiana and started shooting during Trainwreck. Two women died, and nine people were injured. “It felt a little bit like something that I had done, that there was a connection to me actually hurting people,” a devastated Schumer recalled in an interview with Lena Dunham in Lenny Letter. Schumer started to appear alongside Senator Chuck Schumer (a cousin) to jointly call for stronger gun-control legislation.

  When she returned to work on the new season of Inside Amy, a bodyguard stood by as the writers’ room churned out increasingly direct political material. Season four’s second episode was called “Welcome to the Gun Show.” In the title sequence, Schumer plays a Home Shopping Network saleswoman hawking handguns as stocking stuffers—perfect for the person in your life with violent felonies! She promises that, in the next segment, you can buy lawmakers “whose influence can be purchased for much cheaper than you think,” and then scrolls a real list of members of Congress who get the most money from the gun lobby. The fake network’s 800 number also leads viewers to a real place: a gun-control advocacy group. Another sketch, a bleak parody of injury-attorney TV ads featuring a guilt-ridden lawyer who warns viewers he can do nothing to help victims of gun violence, was deemed too edgy to run on the show. Inside Amy released the video online two months later, however, after Congress failed to pass gun-control amendments in the wake of the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

  “The thing is toeing the line so that people don’t feel you’re getting too preachy,” Schumer tells me. “And because I am a celebrity now, people are watching and thinking, Oh, she thinks she’s so important now that she’s going to help with the gun violence.” Despite the danger of being seen as pompous, Schumer went into the new season determined to slip some education into the show. At one point, she tried to adapt the 1985 movie Clue into a half-hour argument about gun control, along the lines of the “12 Angry Men” episode. She even got some of the actors from the original film to commit, but, she says, “it just never got funny, so we walked away from it. No one’s going to watch and say, ‘Wow, they had such good intentions here!’ You have to have the laugh.”

  In the same “Gun Show” episode, Inside Amy threw in a bit about online trolls harassing women. The VP of a social media site announces a bold new feature: in addition to the “Like” function, there would now be an “I’m going to rape and kill you” button. It might’ve seemed didactic to some viewers, but Schumer herself had become the target of a fusillade of rage, on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet. The backlash struck hard, just as it had for Roseanne Barr and Lena Dunham.

  Once seen as a ballsy girl who could drink and swear like an average Joe, Schumer had now mutated, in some quarters of the public imagination, into a ballbusting hypocritical feminist fame monster. The hits came from all sides and many angles. She was reviled as a fat-shamer when she complained that Glamour magazine included her in a “plus-size” issue without telling her. She was reviled for being obese when word leaked out that she was in talks to play Barbie in a movie based on the doll. She was reviled for stealing jokes from other comedians. She was reviled for telling racist jokes in her past stand-up. And the reviling only got viler when Sc
humer began campaigning for Hillary Clinton. At an October 2016 stand-up performance at a Tampa, Florida, arena, a few hundred fans walked out after Schumer called Trump an “orange, sexual-assaulting, fake-college-starting monster.”

  She joined Lena Dunham as the alt-right’s favorite feminist bêtes noires. Denizens of right-wing Reddit boards rushed to ding her book, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, with poor ratings on Amazon, seemingly using a similar tactic in March 2017, when Netflix released The Leather Special, a new Schumer stand-up act. On Instagram, she trolled her trolls with backhanded thanks for the attention: “It makes me feel so powerful and dangerous and brave. It reminds me what I’m saying is effective and brings more interest to my work . . . their obsession with me keeps me going.”

  * * *

  Schumer once observed that people don’t “want to hear a woman talk for too long. A lot of people project their mom yelling at them. My [career] has been about tricking people into listening.” For female comedians, that has often meant acting like a cool girl who can hang with the guys.

  Gillian Flynn defines the mythical “cool girl” in her novel Gone Girl as “a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex . . . while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding.” Like the adorkable manic pixie dream girl, the cool girl is an impossible archetype for any real woman to fulfill. Schumer skewers this fantasy in a sketch called “Cool with It,” written by Jessi Klein. Playing a woman who pretends to be wildly “cool” with anything her male colleagues suggest, Schumer hangs with them at a strip club, knocks back shots, and then single-handedly digs a grave for the stripper one of her workmates accidentally choked.

  What seems to particularly enrage some men is a female performer who doesn’t resemble a supermodel but is undaunted by that, who moves through the world with self-confidence. In fact, one of Schumer’s favorite Inside Amy characters is Merryweather Sherman in the sketch “Babies & Bustiers,” a monstrously cocky six-year-old beauty-pageant girl who is convinced of her superiority over the smaller, daintier competitors. The character harks back to Baby Snooks, the bratty toddler character created by Fanny “Funny Girl” Brice that allowed the saucy vaudeville star to say all kinds of ornery things that adult women couldn’t get away with on American radio in the 1940s.

  When I ask Schumer why her own self-assurance infuriates others, she just laughs. “What is that about? Lena, Mindy, and I are aligned for a bunch of reasons, but I think it’s just our unbridled, unapologetic confidence that scares people. That’s maybe also why women didn’t vote for Hillary.” She says that if people voted on comics, “I might be out of a job.”

  Like Schumer, Jacobson and Glazer aligned themselves with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The candidate made a cameo on Broad City in 2016, hoping to prove to hip American millennials that she had a sense of humor. The writers proposed having Clinton utter, “Yas, Queen” (Ilana’s favorite catchphrase), but instead, the brief scene mostly involves Clinton beaming at campaign volunteers Abbi and Ilana as they hyperventilate with excitement. Jacobson insisted at a SXSW panel in March 2016 that they were not trying “to make a political stance here. It was really more that this is something Ilana’s character would do. Hillary, even regardless of where we stand—and we love Hillary—is such an iconic figure.”

  Where Inside Amy was increasingly pointed in its messaging, Broad City maintained its sunny, optimistic drift. Glazer told one reporter that Schumer’s “message is more transparent than ours, I think. Each one of her sketches has a message, and she just happens to make it so funny.” That kind of serious intent wouldn’t really fly in Broad City’s romper room. While the painful comedy of Schumer exorcizes real-world demons, Broad City presents a triumphant portrait of women creating their own reality. Perhaps what’s really subversive about Broad City is the way that Abbi and Ilana are radically carefree; male opinions and desires are irrelevant to them. Guys remain peripheral figures: crushes, creeps, or authority figures who are ineffectual and easily outfoxed.

  Glazer and Jacobson’s challenge now is finding a way for their heroines to evolve without losing the fundamental goofiness and ribaldry that make them so lovable—to bridge the gap between the show’s scrappy twenty-something characters and the hardworking thirty-something creators who play them. As Glazer puts it, the paradox of the series is that “we work so hard to create the space within which we can just play.” Ultimately, Broad City is a portrait of an unconditional friendship that inspires them to ever-wilder flights of freedom. It’s the kind of camaraderie between women that feels essential in a regressive political moment. By creating a space for themselves to cavort, they are also making room for all of us to experiment.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Crime Family Values:

  Jenji Kohan’s Weeds and Orange Is the New Black

  Jenji Kohan at work on Orange Is the New Black in November 2013.

  Jenji Kohan’s production company is nestled inside an ornate old theater building near Los Angeles’s seedy MacArthur Park. A grand, tangerine-colored hallway leads to the staff’s offices. Orange Is the New Black executive producer Mark Burley sits in back in an office decorated with an inflatable palm tree and Santeria candles featuring Orange Is the New Black characters. He is musing on what unites Kohan heroines such as Weeds’s Nancy Botwin and Orange’s Piper Chapman. “It is somebody who comes from a fairly normal middle-class morality set who behaves outside that morality set. Nancy and Piper are making their own morality,” Burley concludes.

  “I think people generally reassure themselves that they are the good guy, even when they are not,” Kohan elaborates several months later. She says she is fascinated by the way that people in morally compromised situations “create codes, lines you won’t cross so you can keep telling yourself you are a good person.”

  When Showtime picked up Weeds in 2004, male antiheroes swaggered across the cable landscape like malevolent gods. Jenji Kohan had a response to macho archetypes like Tony Soprano: Nancy Botwin, a suburban homemaker turned gangster whose journey would whisk her from bake sales and PTA meetings to weed dealing and standoffs with drug lords.

  “I prefer the gray areas,” says Kohan, who favors bright, candy-colored hair. “With Weeds, I was looking for a little more truth in my characters. It’s actually easier to identify with people who are flawed.” Kohan plunged deeper into the gray zone with Orange Is the New Black, a show consisting entirely of people who, on paper, ought to be utterly unsympathetic: hardened criminals and their callous or corrupt jailers. Now she was interweaving the plotlines of dozens of antiheroines, each of whom seized tiny moments of elation and enlightenment in the shadow of the prison industrial complex.

  “A good deal of people in prison are serving time for the worst day of their lives or a really bad situation they were in, not because of the darkness of their soul,” Kohan says ruefully. “They are spending a great deal of time in prison for crimes that took very little time to commit. I think there are those who are nuts or evil—but very few. People are more complicated than that.”

  * * *

  Television is Jenji Kohan’s birthright. Her father, Buz, is an Emmy-winning TV writer who hauled his family from New York City to Los Angeles when he got a gig on The Carol Burnett Show. Her older brother, David, went into the family business, too, co-creating the sitcom Will & Grace.

  Dinner-table conversation was competitive in the Kohan home, with both parents being writers (her mom, Rhea, is a novelist). “They say there are book Jews and money Jews,” Jenji once told the Jewish Journal. “We were raised book Jews; it was about intellectual and educational and personal achievement. It wasn’t about accumulation.”

  The Kohan kids were expected to become doctors or lawyers or scientists. That held little interest for young Jenji, who won some writing contests as a teenager. While attending Columbia Uni
versity in the late eighties, she landed an internship at Franklin Furnace, a downtown Manhattan haven for spoken-word performance artists such as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and Karen Finley, which came under fire from Senator Jesse Helms at the height of the culture wars. Kohan briefly entertained thoughts of being a spoken-word performance artist. Looking back now, though, she practically snorts at the idea. “I’m not comfortable onstage. I am very blinky; my voice is very nasal!” she says. So, after graduation, she returned to Los Angeles, where she cobbled together journalism internships and odd jobs.

  Kohan never seriously considered taking up her dad’s line of work until an ex-boyfriend negged her, saying she had more chance of “getting elected to Congress” than working on a TV show. “My impetus was vengeance, initially,” she admits. “I don’t like to be told I can’t do something!”

  While her medical-student roommate pored over anatomy textbooks, Kohan made a forensic study of comedy videotapes from shows such as Roseanne, The Simpsons, and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, then churned out spec scripts. Although her father was a show-biz veteran and her brother, David, was already making his way up the industry ladder, neither was prepared to give her a leg up: “They were like, ‘Go to law school!’ They wanted me to be independent.” Eventually, a friend of the family handed Kohan’s spec scripts to an agent who worked in his building. That led to a job on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where she was often the only woman in the writers’ room. Kohan, just twenty-two, found the Fresh Prince workplace dysfunctional and frustrating. Racial tensions were taut in the wake of the LA riots. She told NPR that, after they’d attended a Louis Farrakhan rally, some of her colleagues started to refer to her by a nickname: “White Devil Jew Bitch.”