'Inside Amy Schumer' Goes Deep
For a raunchy gal who likes to drink and talk smack about sex (and, probably any day now, talk sex about smack), Amy Schumer is certainly an interesting proponent of feminist/humanist principles. The new season of Inside Amy Schumer is very funny, and, just below its surface, very thoughtful.
You may already be familiar with “Milk Milk Lemonade,” the mock music video that begins the new season on Tuesday night — there have been two-million-plus views of her butt-centric production on YouTube alone.
An even stronger piece of comedy follows it during the premiere half-hour: “Friday Town Nights,” in which Josh Charles and Schumer take over the Kyle Chandler-Connie Britton roles from Friday Night Lights. Charles’s new-coach-in-town lays down a set of new rules to his team, the most prominent of which is to forbid rape. Think it’s impossible to make a funny rape joke? Schumer not only does it, she extends the premise to offer a critique of rape culture, sports, and celebrity.
Speaking of the latter, Schumer hits another peak of pointed funniness in a sketch that finds her partying with Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette. The occasion? It’s Louis-Dreyfus’s “last f--kable day.” The idea is that in showbiz, there’s an age any woman in Hollywood reaches after which she is perceived by the industry as not being appealing in a sexual sense to the desired moviegoing demographic. It’s a concept you may have heard before, but Schumer and her impressive array of guest stars make freshly vicious fun of this kind of institutionalized male thinking.
Schumer has become one of the most reliable sources of inventive anarchy. Indeed, the only aspect of her comic persona that’s starting to seem a wee bit tiresome is her increasingly repetitive variations on the notion that she drinks too much. If I was to compare her over-reliance upon inebriation jokes to Chelsea Handler, you might think I’m sexist, so instead, I’ll compare her to Foster Brooks. Consider this your Refresher Class in Comedy History:
Other than this, however, Inside Amy Schumer is off to a very strong start in its new season. She and her writers and producers must work very hard to make her taped bits seem so casually complex — each sketch strives for, and often achieves, an impeccably casual tone that makes the surprise element in nearly every segment all the more funny. Schumer likes to present herself as a lazy goofball, but the quality of her work proves the opposite.
Inside Amy Schumer airs Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
