Fearless feminist icons like Lena Dunham are held to impossible standards and then pilloried. Will the same now happen to brilliant comedian Amy Schumer?
A group of men sit round a table and make one of the most memorable bits of TV I’ve seen. In a perfect remake of 12 Angry Men, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Goldblum, and Dennis Quaid argue furiously across an episode of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, their shirts becoming increasingly rumpled. But instead of debating the innocence of a boy accused of murdering his own father, the jurors must decide whether or not comedian Schumer is hot enough to be on TV. “Look, we’ve all at some point in our lives gotten a semi for a girl with a pillowy stomach or Muppet tits,” the Fonda stand-in sweats, attempting to persuade his peers that comedian Schumer, while not hot, is still “bangable”. “And that’s all the system demands for us to acquit Amy.” The room becomes claustrophobic. A man breaks down. This is probably the best, most political comedy sketch to feature duelling dildos that you’ll see all year.
There’s a scene in Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants where Amy Poehler is practising a new joke on her Saturday Night Live colleagues, and Jimmy Fallon shouts: “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.” “I don’t fucking care if you like it,” Poehler replies, with dark-eyed calm. “With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place,” Fey recalls. “Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute.” Like the 12 Angry Men – real-life incarnations of whom you can find right now commenting below-the-line – much of Schumer’s comedy (the second season of Inside Amy Schumer is out in the UK this summer) is the embodiment of this exchange. Fey cameos in an episode, along with Patricia Arquette and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Schumer stumbles across them having a picnic – they’re performing a Viking funeral to celebrate what the media have decided is Julia’s “last fuckable day”.
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