Talking ’bout my, my vag-g-g-ina

By Katherine Monk

It doesn’t really matter if half the act is already familiar. Amy Schumer is the kind of woman capable of multiples, allowing the same joke to ripple through the body of her routine several times over.

I’d already heard the bit about feeling fat in Los Angeles when she appeared on Ellen: She said her arms registered as legs, that her trainer told her to starve and sleep with a peanut under her pillow, and that people often mistook her for an octopus.

“Everyone in Los Angeles is good-looking. I saw a guy cleaning up the Pizza Hut bathroom… I would have paid him to fuck me. People don’t even see me there… They’re like, is that a fat tumbleweed?”

This is the kind of stuff Schumer owns: self-deprecating body blows that land so accurately, they knock the block off the status quo and force us to examine our own assumptions as well as our own self-loathing.

“I lost my front teeth late… I got my period early. I was basically a Jack O’ Lantern with tits…,” she says as a way of explaining how she got into standup.

When Schumer says she’s too “big” for show business, we get what’s she’s saying because she doesn’t look like the women we see on TV, with hollowed out cheeks and lips of silicone. She looks normal. She looks like us, which makes her an alien in Hollywood, and by extension, a touchstone for the masses who fantasize about gaining access to the VIP room.

Schumer has become the everywoman’s ambassador to fame, and as this first HBO Special makes abundantly clear, she’s the perfect person for the job.

She’s a fan just like us. But she’s smart enough to have perspective, and funny enough to turn the whole celebrity reality into an obscene joke.

“Did you see Zookeeper? Well, don’t. The male romantic lead is Kevin James…and he’s dating a beautiful blond skeleton but he’s sad because sometimes, she’s mean to him. And the woman who’s been waiting in the wings is Rosario Dawson, arguably the most fuckable actress ever…. This movie has a beaver and a penguin who are friends and looking to open a bed and breakfast together, but that’s not the most unbelievable part of the movie…it’s Rosario wanting Kevin James. I dare Meryl Streep to play that role…”

Schumer cuts so close to the bone, but you never worry she’s going to take it too far and castrate half her audience. She mocks dick mercilessly, but she loves it at the same time, retracting the blade of her comic box cutter before it draws blood.

It’s a crafty dance that combines social observation, trenchant bouts of female vulgarity and personal confession into a well-scripted stream of consciousness essay on what it means to be a woman who isn’t valued for the way she looks.

Amy Schumer: She’s more than a lady, she’s a whole woman who isn’t afraid to refer to her vagina, even if she is afraid to look at it.

At one point, Schumer tells us she’d been doing standup for 11 years before she broke into the mainstream this past year with Trainwreck. She tells us male comics get laid on the road all the time, but not women because women who are funny, and make fun of sex, can be a little too threatening.

“I’m labeled a sex comic… but I think it’s just because I’m a girl. I feel like a guy could get up here and pull his dick out and people would be like ‘he’s a thinker!’”

It’s impossible to disagree with Schumer’s take on the whole hairy ball of wax that is Hollywood, which is why she’s become the perfect antidote to Tom Cruise movies and the cult of Brad Pitt. She’s not coming from a place of hate, or even resentment. She’s just pointing out an all too convenient, and entirely unfair truth: Women are still valued for their ‘fuckability’ instead of their skill set.

Schumer is pointing out systemic injustice with attitude and an eye for the absurd the way black comics did back in the day, and still do, which is why Chris Rock was a great choice for a director, and why the Apollo was a natural venue.

For fans of Schumer’s sketch comedy show, Inside Amy Schumer, this hour-long piece of standup (with five extra minutes on the DVD) is like watching her home movies and reading her diary. We get more back story, some insight into what makes her comedy engine purr, and a sampling of what she was doing for a decade before she became famous: Making us laugh at our T&A-obsessed culture by nailing her own T&A to an inflatable cross, then watching it sputter in mid-air making fart noises before falling gently back to the ground.

Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo airs on HBO Canada January 23 and 24. The stand-alone DVD is available now.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, January 18, 2016

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