The Little Tramp

Comedy with a message can easily turn didactic or smug, but Schumer’s show feels built to withstand this pressure.Photograph by Martin Schoeller / AUGUST

“I really need to stop making so many white girls,” God, played by Paul Giamatti, groans, on Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” In this sketch, the blond ditz “Amy Schumer”—a self-lacerating version of the comedian who plays her—finds out that she’s got herpes from a hookup. Her irritated Creator notes that this is the first time she’s prayed to him in years. Schumer explains that she’s a role model now, and that young girls shouldn’t see her buying Valtrex. God says he’ll have to destroy a village in Uzbekistan to cure her; she’s cool with that. However, she refuses his demand that she stop drinking. “Can I just blow you?” she whines. “I’m gay,” he says, disgusted.

Raunchy, rough, a destabilizing mixture of daffy and caustic, Schumer’s series débuted under the radar, in 2013. A blend of standup routines, mostly about sex; person-on-the-street interviews, also about sex; and satirical sketches, the series had an unusually high hit rate for a new comedy show. But this spring is clearly Schumer’s breakout moment. She’s on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, in a parody of the poster for “American Beauty,” blond curls splayed, lying on a bed of minibar liquor bottles rather than rose petals. In July, her romantic comedy “Trainwreck,” directed by Judd Apatow (who has unexpectedly blossomed into female comedy’s fairy godfather), will début. The show’s new season, its third, has a higher profile, too: it’s more star-studded and also more overtly political. The show has always had feminist streaks; now it’s letting the roots grow out. The first episode, which aired two weeks ago, yielded two viral hits, one a perfect “Friday Night Lights” parody, in which Josh Charles plays a football coach who outrages his town with a “no raping” rule, the other a sketch about Hollywood double standards called “Last Fuckable Day,” starring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette.

Both skits were timely and also very funny. (“Football Town Nights,” in particular, was a sharp interrogation of football culture, featuring earnest jocks so confused about the coach’s new rule that they pepper him with questions like “But what if my mom’s a D.A. and won’t prosecute?”) That said, there’s a risk to Schumer’s rise—when you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you. Now comes the hype, the lash and the backlash and the backlash to the backlash, the hero worship and the red-hot fury—no pressure, Amy Schumer! It’s happened again and again to the new wave of female TV creators, the Tinas and Mindys and Lenas, whose fans want role models as well as artists—a demand that many female comics embrace but that’s rarely required of men. (Louis C.K., whose show is having a terrific rebound season, doesn’t owe his fans anything except comedy.) And yet it’s hard to deny the effectiveness of the speech Schumer gave at a Ms. Foundation event last year, in which she described, in raw detail, a cruddy college sexual encounter. It woke her up to how far she’d sunk—and the way that the world’s focus on “fuckability” can throw her right back into self-hatred. “I say if I’m beautiful. I say if I’m strong,” she told the audience, delivering a sort of mission statement for her show, where she dredges the wreckage of that younger self.

There’s nothing new about comedy with a feminist bent: one of my most prized possessions is a humor collection called “Titters,” whose cover features a busty woman in a tight T-shirt. Published in 1976, and edited by the few female writers of “Saturday Night Live,” it was the “first collection of humor by women,” with contributors ranging from Phyllis Diller to a pre-Huffington Arianna Stassinopoulos. Like many classic humor anthologies, it’s largely dated and dumb, aside from some bits that are hilariously mean. (If you think feminist infighting is new, check out the parody of Nora Ephron’s “small breasts” essay, which turns that body part into “sharp elbows.”) But it’s a useful relic of a time when feminists were libelled as humorless, a smear that persists. The truth is, the madcap polemicists of the seventies, from Bella Abzug to Valerie Solanas, with her notorious man-hating “SCUM Manifesto,” were often outrageously funny, using gonzo cracks to express their anger. Anti-feminists have always disguised their insults as jokes. (“Can’t you take a joke?”) But a joke can be the slickest response: an expression of savoir-faire in the face of hatred.

Comedy with a message can also easily turn didactic—or, worse, smug. Luckily, Schumer’s show feels built to withstand this pressure, even as it expands its reach, touching on subjects like reproductive rights and equal pay. (Credit is due to the show’s writers, including Jessi Klein, Tig Notaro, and Schumer’s sister, Kim Caramele.) This is mainly because of the grotty, chaotic persona that Schumer has developed, allowing her to poke just as hard at young single women, in their blinkered vanity, as she does at the toxic messages that surround them. In Schumer’s standup, she’s one of them: “sluttier than the average bear,” a binge drinker who knows that blacking out isn’t cute anymore. Her target is the ugliness of urban heterosexual hookups: Plan B, money shots, and other hassles of the age. In this iteration, she’s smart but self-destructive, the sadder-but-wiser girl, who knows how easily desperation can masquerade as freedom.

In contrast, the girl whom Schumer satirizes in her sketches, in many permutations, is brutally clueless. She’s the subject of every op-ed on “girls today”—a needy narcissist, all bravado and entitlement. This Amy is the “dumb slut” and the “whiny white girl.” She’s the bad bridesmaid, the chick who gives out blow jobs like handshakes, who is so obsessed with taking the perfect selfie that she hires a team of stylists. She’s the type that a friend of mine once nicknamed the Whoo! Girl—we’d see her at Coyote Ugly with her posse, yelling “Whoo!,” fake-twerking, then weeping at 3 a.m. (Don’t ask me what I was doing at Coyote Ugly at 3 a.m.) In some of these sketches, that alternate Amy is a self-obsessed monster, but in others she’s vulnerable. In one brilliant early routine, she gets a booty-call text, and keeps writing and deleting replies, from “I am so lonely all the ti—” and “I would love another shot at giving you a blo—” to “Tell me what all my remotes do.” (When the guy sends a dick pic, she replies, “I love pugs!!! Is it a rescue?”) When she’s a secret agent, her code name is Butterface. When she agrees to appear in a children’s animated film, her character turns out to be a meerkat with exposed labia, who defecates onscreen. Her only line is a growled “Wooorms.”

This self-mockery could turn into masochism, but somehow it never does, in part because the sharpness of the jokes is itself a form of self-assertion. In the first season, Amy recommends “porn from a woman’s P.O.V.,” then shows footage with angles staring up a guy’s nostril; in another sketch, she announces that, as a feminist, she’s hosting a gang bang (sponsored by “Sea Spray”), “to prove that women aren’t objects.” A murderously funny ad for plastic surgery asks, “Don’t you owe it to yourself to look like you fell into a tank of chemicals while fighting Batman?” Such sketches are aimed at a degrading culture, but they also explore women’s gameness to prove that they are, to quote one recent sketch, “cool with it.” Some of the best scenes involve circles of female friends, such as one in which the women are so competitively self-deprecating that when one of them accepts a compliment all the others commit suicide.

This subject matter isn’t Schumer’s alone, of course. It would be easy to put her in a category with female comedians who talk dirty: the brilliant Sarah Silverman; that defiantly dead-souled essentialist Whitney Cummings; Lena Dunham, our era’s op-ed magnet; the satirical narcissist Mindy Kaling; the funky Laverne & Shirley of “Broad City,” Abbi and Ilana; the flamboyant boozehound Chelsea Handler. They follow in a tradition that extends back to Mae West and Moms Mabley, and outward to comic artists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Julie Doucet, creators inspired by female abjection. Such comparisons are often a trap: they suggest that women artists exist only in the context of one another, and must be compared, so that some may be deemed insufficiently radical. Louis is a drunken slut, too, after all. But there’s something to be said for an “All boats rise” moment, which makes this material the default, not the exception. The haters (an actual set of people—I’ve met them) dismiss Schumer’s act as “guy humor,” talking dirty to please men. But graphic sex talk gets Schumer to uncomfortable places, including rare candor about the underside of a porn-soaked world. There are moments when Schumer’s comedy verges on Dworkinesque, nailing some girls’ willingness to eat shit, just to be liked.

Even better, just as she hits the mainstream, Schumer is increasing the number of her targets. The most ambitious material in this season’s first three episodes is a half-hour, black-and-white parody of the movie “Twelve Angry Men.” It begins as a reboot of an earlier sketch, in which an all-male focus group debates whether Amy is hot enough for TV, but soon it dives deeper. An amazing cast, including Jeff Goldblum, Vincent Kartheiser, Kumail Nanjiani, and a fuming Giamatti, begins by rating Amy’s looks, but as the conversation expands the men begin to fight about the roots of sexual attraction, the rise of female comedy, and just whose tastes count as normal. This somehow leads to duelling dildos, which replace the knives from the movie. By the end, the sketch feels like it’s an investigation of the fury of men online, the ones who fill every comment thread about Schumer—or any other female comic—with scathing judgments. It’s a comedic method as old as grade school: she’s rubber, they’re glue. ♦