Amy Schumer - GQ's 15 Funniest People Alive
- ️@gqmagazine
- ️Tue May 06 2014
Anybody who’s spent more than two minutes around Amy Schumer knows that she has a favorite subject. And that subject is sex. Whether she’s onstage at a comedy club or writing sketches for her hit Comedy Central show,_ Inside Amy Schumer_, or delivering one of her legendary celebrity roasts, you can wager your firstborn that there will be a joke about the process by which your firstborn was created. Sometimes this throws people for a loop. With her fresh face and her long blond curls pulled back in a cheerleader ponytail, Schumer looks like she could help you find a pair of jeans at a Gap store in Minnesota. She can make the word labia sound like the name of a teddy bear. "People see a picture of me," she says, "and they think, ’Oh, she looks so sweet! Kind of Amish! We should bring the family!’ Then they get here, and I’m like, ’So, my pussy...’ "
This undying appetite for dirty jokes, however, does not mean that she will acquiesce to just any old sex bit. Case in point: Last spring, Schumer was chosen to perform at a Friars Club roast with iconic pratfall virtuoso Jerry Lewis. She had become famous for her ruthlessly blue roasts; Lewis has famously and repeatedly voiced some crusty-old-guy opinions about female comics. (Recent example: "I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator.") Sarah Silverman was followed by another lady comic, after whose set Jerry jumped up, hugged her, and then bent her over to mime sexual intercourse.
The same fate awaited Schumer. "He came up, and we hugged each other, and then he started pushing me back, trying to lay me down on the stage," she remembers. "So I buckled down and used my knees to stay in place, and he was in my ear saying, ’Lay down.’ I whispered ’No’ in his ear. Even after I said no, he was still trying. I had to use my core to stay up—he’s a strong motherfucker." Eventually, Lewis gave up, and Schumer returned to her seat un-air-schtupped.
"I’m not going to be the girl who gets fucked after her set," she says. "Sorry, Jerry Lewis."
"What’s next: herpes, or interracial photography?"
I am jammed onto a couch with Schumer and a handful of her Inside Amy Schumer writers at a small office in Midtown Manhattan where the team is editing footage for season two. The coffee table is littered with half-drunk bottles of green juices; Schumer is going to town on a bag of one-hundred-calorie popcorn. "Why is this the best popcorn?" she asks rhetorically. Jessi Klein, the show’s head writer, deadpans: "It’s not."
The first very funny (but not in a TBS way) season of Inside Amy Schumer was a humongous hit. When it aired in the spring of 2013, it almost immediately lifted her from being a pinch-hit celebrity roaster to the brink of massive stardom. In fact, it was one of those roasts, her 2011 onstage evisceration of Charlie Sheen, that helped her land the series with Comedy Central. (She also delivered a memorable punch to fellow-roaster/guy-who-used-to-hit-people-for-a-living Mike Tyson: "You have a slutty lower-back tattoo on your face. Men don’t know whether to be scared of it or finish on it.") Now, as she polishes off season two, she’s simultaneously writing a script for a movie that will be directed this summer by Judd Apatow. It’ll star Amy Schumer playing someone a lot like the stand-up persona of Amy Schumer. It’s called Trainwreck.
Today, though, is all about the TV show, and it turns out neither herpes nor interracial photography is slated next. Rather, it’s a sketch about rape in the military, which is much funnier than it sounds. In it, Schumer is sitting next to her boyfriend while he plays a Call of Duty–type video game. When he gets up for beer, she takes the controller and tries out the game as a female soldier. But before her avatar can leave the barracks, she’s blocked by a male soldier, and a message appears on-screen: "You were just assaulted by a fellow soldier. Do you wish to report?" What?! She clicks "yes." "Are you sure?" the game asks menacingly.
This kind of squirmy, statement-making material is Schumer’s calling card. There is—for lack of a less PBS-y word—a message behind her sex-focused riffs, whether it’s the sketch from an episode of the show last season about trying to organize a feminist gangbang (Susan B. Anthony’s head finally explodes from all the conflicting gender dynamics) or her stand-up bit about the seesaw that is her self-esteem ("Some mornings I wake up and I’m like, ’How did anyone ever fuck meeee?’ and then the next day I wake up and it’s like ’My pussy’s fucking magic!’") "The great thing about Amy," Apatow tells me, "is that she’s honest—to a fault."
Last year, Inside Amy Schumer kicked off with a bit about an audition for the infamous Internet video "2 Girls 1 Cup." The director tells Amy about all the horrific scenes she’d have to do for no money—and, he adds, "we need you to definitely lose some weight. And I’m thinking—ballpark—three, five pounds. Mainly in the face." That sketch aired. But Schumer is concerned that this military-rape sketch is too pointedly political to make it past the network ecs. Specifically, she’s hung up on her response when the boyfriend comes back, beer in hand, and doubts her story: "Trust me, it happened."
"I just think that’s way too heavy-handed," Schumer argues. "I could see a young male viewer feeling reprimanded." Some of the other writers disagree. Jessi Klein quotes something she heard in a Kathleen Hanna documentary: "When a guy says something, it’s automatically true. Women need to say the same thing four times." The group debates the line for another seven minutes, interrupted only by a brief discussion about the hotness of the current Bachelor, Juan Pablo. ("Ay yi yi," Schumer says affirmatively, imitating what Juan Pablo says every time he sees a contestant’s boobies.) Eventually Amy decides to keep it.
"If we are going to go for the joke," she explains to me later, "let’s really go for it and not apologize for it."
Schumer’s apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of a Manhattan luxury high-rise looks lifted directly from the pages of a West Elm catalog. The place is crisp and clean and tastefully moneyed—it’s the first clear evidence I see that onstage-Amy (riffs about drunken blackouts, failed diets, one-night stands) and offstage-Amy (while we talk: bottled water, take-out sushi without rice) don’t neatly overlap with each other. Not as often as they used to, anyway. "I think every person who gets into stand-up does it because something went very wrong," she says when we sit down. "Like, something happened. The successful ones, anyway. I don’t know anybody who’s like, ’No, everything was always fucking great.’ " I ask her what went very wrong for her and she tells me the story you’re about to read. But she also says she’s leaving out the worst of it. "There’s been no shortage of trauma in my life."
Schumer, now 32, was born in Manhattan, the second of three kids. For a while the family lived on the Upper East Side. Her father owned a baby-furniture company that imported products from Italy. They did well. "You know how, if one mother is like, ’Well, my baby’s crib was built in Milan,’ then another mother is like, ’I must have a crib from Milan for my precious angel!’" she says. Every Friday night they’d go to synagogue. Schumer celebrated her bat mitzvah at Medieval Times in New Jersey, a restaurant where you gnaw on ye olde game hen while watching recent theater majors joust with one another.
But shortly after, things fell apart. Her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and his company went bankrupt. Her parents divorced. And to top it off, her boobs came in way early. But throughout it all, Schumer remained outwardly buoyant. "I’m the middle child, so I kept trying to keep everyone in a good place," she says. "Like, let’s laugh about this. Let’s laugh about how sad it is that the bank is taking dad’s car away."
Schumer’s father is now in an assisted-living facility, and her Instagram is scattered with recent pictures of the two of them together, sitting poolside. Her younger sister, Kim, is her best friend and road manager as well as a producer on Trainwreck. She’s on good terms with both her parents, though the night I watched her perform, she did call her mother a cunt onstage. (It was loving.)
Her parents may be wise to her stand-up persona, but not everyone is. Case in point: Because Schumer is constantly joking about sex, people assume she’s constantly having sex. Onstage-Amy’s told countless jokes about anal sex and men coming in un-biologically-designated places—but in reality, offstage-Amy tells me, she’s never done either. At her apartment, Schumer and I have a long, honest talk about relationships and the hardships of New York dating. "The guys who actually know me," she says, "know that it’s really pretty hard to fuck me."
The funny thing about this story is that while I was writing about Amy Schumer, she was more or less writing about me. In case you think I’m making this up, I will now quote Amy Schumer saying what I just did:
"It’s so funny," Amy Schumer said. "I’m writing about you while you’re writing about me!"
In an earlier version of her movie script, her character was a used-car saleswoman, but Apatow pooh-poohed the idea. (Lifelong dream to write "Apatow pooh-poohed.")
"I didn’t see Amy as someone who would sell used cars," he told me. "I like when creative people play creative people." So the character became a female writer at a men’s magazine—in other words, basically me. In fact, the first time Schumer and I ever communicated, last October, it was her e-mailing me: She had some questions about what it was like being a GQ lady-writer.
A week later she called me from Chicago’s O’Hare airport, wanting to know if I thought that "Anal: Test Your Waters" was a plausible men’s-magazine cover line. I admit I was overly psyched—Amy Schumer wants my opinion!—so I started giving her way too much information. Thirty seconds in, she piped up to tell me her plane was boarding, and then she hung up.*
Schumer described movie-me to me this way: "She’s a woman whose behavior eventually catches up to her." Examples: drinking, cheating, "sticking your nose up at people who do kinda have it together." The men’s-magazine setting grew out of recent experience. "I’ve been doing a lot of press in the last couple of years, and I knew it would be a fun place to satirize a little." Like how? "Well, there’s a little bit about how, when they profile a girl, it’s always right on the precipice of, like, ’We almost fucked.’ Like, ’She walked in, and her nipples were just a little hard, and she ordered a whiskey because her throat hurt.’ "
(Please note: Not once in this article have I alluded to the state of Schumer’s nipples.)
The last time I talk to Schumer, she calls me from an hour outside Jacksonville (she starts singing Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams" when she tells me her location) en route to another show. Since she’ll soon be playing a men’s-magazine writer, I ask her how she would end a story about herself. She thinks for a long moment. "You guys always try to end on a truthful beat. Something that says something about the person at that stage of their life. I guess I’d write a scene about what I am doing right now: I’m in the back of a beautiful tour bus, in my own bedroom, going to a sold-out show. I have to send in notes for the second season of my television show, and also Judd Apatow’s waiting on my latest draft of this movie. But I wish I had somebody who was going to watch a movie with me after my show tonight."
Unfortunately, this is a story about comedy, and as any veteran men’s-magazine writer can tell you, that lovely scene is a tad too melancholy. So here’s this instead: Amy Schumer’s nipples are at half-mast.
*Disclaimer as footnote: Like anybody else with a brain, I love Amy Schumer. And like anyone else with a slight mental disorder, I admit I was tempted to single-white-female her. For I too am a blonde lady who likes making jokes about genitals. Did I entertain fantasies that we might become best friends during this dual months-long examination of each other’s deepest souls? Yes. Am I slightly embarrassed by it? Also, yes. Did it happen? Not really. But we do favorite each other’s tweets from time to time. And as the Jews say: dayenu, it is enough for us.
Lauren Bans (@LaurenBans) _ recently left GQ and is now a screenwriter, which is kinda JUST LIKE AMY OMG!_