Amy Schumer Says, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, No Raping!”
Season three of Inside Amy Schumer premiered this past weekend on Comedy Central and, as expected, the comedienne didn’t pull any punches. In a sketch that parodied the show Friday Night Lights, Schumer plays a Pinot Grigio-swilling Tammy Taylor-type married to Josh Charles’s earnest football coach.
The coach sends a small town into disarray when he asks his football players to stop raping women. The boys are incredulous: “What if it’s Halloween and she’s dressed like a sexy cat?”
The video short has earned mostly positive reviews, although the New York Times griped that “the one-note sketch runs on too long.” Still, Schumer earns points for tackling a controversial issue head on. In a talk at the Tribeca Film Festival, Schumer said, “Rape is good fodder for comedy because it’s the worst thing in the whole world, so it’s untouchable … We’re not just like, rape’s hilarious.” No doubt, Schumer’s take on Friday Night Football comes at a time when campus rape is a topical conversation, whether it’s down to the firestorm that erupted over Rolling Stone’s coverage of an alleged sex attack at UVA, the Steubenville cases, or the imminent publication of reporter Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula,” about a series of rapes on the town’s university campus, some perpetrated by members of its Grizzlies football team.
One of the show’s writers, Christine Nangle, says she had the idea for the sketch, “When I was reading about Steubenville. I just was thinking, What’s the way to get into that? I just kept getting frustrated with the permissiveness of the football town culture and the school and the parents. It started to become so ridiculous to me that I saw how it could be funny. The struggle with that one was to not make it too heavy-handed.”
Fellow writer Jessi Klein concurs: “We’re finding a way to talk about things in the culture that aren’t finding their way comedically on TV [otherwise]….But I don’t feel like it ever weighs us down in terms of there being an agenda. Because again, things like lessons and agendas tend to not be very funny and kind of kill the joy in both creating and watching things.” With outlets from Slate to MTV calling the ‘Friday Night Football’ “perfect,” it seems the comedy team may just have accomplished the impossible: landing a rape joke.
