Not long after Amy Schumer won a Peabody Award for her sketch-comedy series, “Inside Amy Schumer,” in 2015, she appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” She had been making “Inside Amy” for three seasons, and Letterman asked if she found that it was getting easier with time. “I find that I’m getting easier,” she said. “But the show . . .” She shook her head, her expression a mask of guilelessness. (As always with Schumer, the raciness of what she was suggesting was offset by the wholesomeness of her face. She “kind of looks Amish,” in her own description, “kind of Cabbage Patch-y up top.”) Letterman, who was set to retire soon, said that this would be their last time on air together, and asked her to do something she’d regret. Schumer, wearing a tight black dress with a split skirt, stood, hiked up the hem, and pointed out a long white line across her upper thigh. “What is that?” Letterman asked, as the camera went close on Schumer’s scar, the result of an adolescent surfing accident. She smiled warmly and said, “That’s my vagina!”
It was a paradigmatic moment of Schumer comedy: daffy, destabilizing, genital. “Are you that girl from the television who talks about her pussy all the time?” Julia Louis-Dreyfus asks her in an episode of “Inside Amy.” (In the sketch, “Last Fuckable Day,” Schumer stumbles on Louis-Dreyfus picnicking with Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette, to celebrate the end of her plausible onscreen desirability. “Honey, men don’t have that day,” Arquette explains to Schumer.) Early in Schumer’s career, when she was young and taut and blond and sometimes bounded onstage carrying a bottle of Chardonnay, she was branded a sex comic. Her first standup special, a decade ago, was titled “Mostly Sex Stuff.” “I know I make it sound like I’m so slutty up here,” she told the audience. “But I’ve only been with four people. And that was a weird night.” In her next special, Schumer spoke in defense of semen: “Come gives us life. Gandhi was come. Oprah: come.” She dressed the part, using short skirts and plunging necklines instrumentally. “People see a female comedian, and they’re just, like, ‘Yawn,’ and ‘What else is on?’ ” Schumer told Howard Stern at the time. “You see some skin, and at least you’ll stay tuned and listen to what she has to say.”
Audiences have always responded to Schumer revealing herself. In 2016, she became the first female comic to headline—and sell out—Madison Square Garden. “Inside Amy” won three Emmy Awards. She wrote and starred in the hit film “Trainwreck” (party girl experiments with commitment), which was followed by “Snatched” (party girl gets kidnapped with her mom) and “I Feel Pretty” (party girl sustains head injury and gains freakish confidence in her looks). But Schumer is married now, with a three-year-old son, and her tone has shifted. Since the pandemic began, she has appeared in “Expecting Amy,” an HBO documentary series about her gruelling pregnancy, and in a reality show with her husband called “Amy Schumer Learns to Cook.” Most recently, she launched the autobiographical dramedy “Life & Beth,” on Hulu. At the end of each episode, viewers see her production company’s logo: a photograph, taken after her recent hysterectomy, of her bloody uterus on a blue hospital cloth, wearing a pair of sunglasses.
Late this spring, as the Supreme Court was preparing to effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, Schumer was seated at the Champions of Choice awards luncheon, an event that she referred to as the “abortion Oscars.” As Dr. DeShawn Taylor, who runs a family-planning clinic in Phoenix, spoke about “ethical access to health care for womb-bearing people,” Schumer scribbled a set list on the donation card, which she had filled out for ten thousand dollars: “C-section, failed, butthole, hyperemesis, Viagra, dirty talk.”
From the stage, Schumer described giving birth to her son, Gene. “I had a C-section—he came out the sunroof,” she said. “A lot of women feel they’ve failed if they don’t give birth vaginally, and honestly the only thing that comforts me about that is my still-perfect pussy.” The audience screamed with laughter as Schumer ran through her jokes about buttholes, hyperemesis, and Viagra, and settled into a riff about her husband of five years, Chris Fischer. “It’s hard to have sex with your husband, because that’s your family,” she said. “That’s my emergency contact. I can’t just fuck him.” Her voice summoned the weary resignation common among parents of toddlers at the end of a day: “You can’t talk dirty. I can’t be, like, ‘I’m gonna . . .’ He’s, like, ‘No, you’re not. Your back hurts.’ ”
After their son went to bed, on a hot evening this summer, Schumer and Fischer were at their home on Martha’s Vineyard—a shingled cottage on a rocky beach, which they bought a couple of years ago from James Taylor’s brother. Fischer’s family has been on the island for a dozen generations. He grew up there, and became a farmer, then a chef. The couple met when he cooked for Schumer and her family during a vacation.
Fischer was splayed on the floor, dragging his back over a foam roller. Schumer was drinking electrolyte water on the couch. “Sir, please,” she said, to an insect that had landed on her arm, before she flicked it away. Then she went to get a pair of glasses her doctor had recommended she wear while watching television at night: blue-light blockers, for optimal sleep.
Schumer and Fischer had become hooked on “Starstruck,” a BBC series about a drunken encounter between a regular woman and a movie star that turns into an intermittent love affair. I asked Fischer if the show was a good representation of falling in love with a famous person. “No,” he replied solemnly. “It’s unique to this made-up situation.”
Schumer gave just a flicker of an eye roll and said, “What was it like falling in love with a famous person, Chris?”
“Just like falling in love with anyone else,” he answered.
Schumer kept silent for a few beats and then said, “No.”
For one thing, Fischer’s life—his household routine, his parenting, his sexual habits, his diagnosis on the autism spectrum—are woven into jokes that are delivered to thousands of people. (“I like to play the game: Autism? Or just a man?”) Onstage and off, Schumer is uncommonly open. Money, I.V.F., adolescent shoplifting, alcohol-induced blackouts, attending the Met Gala high on mushrooms, pooping her pants: all the things that most people keep desperately private, Schumer airs with no evident discomfort. (“I have twenty million dollars liquid,” she told me. “My expenses are six million a year; I give away about 400K.”) The actress Jennifer Lawrence, a friend of Schumer’s, told me about seeing her social-media posts revealing her plastic surgery: “When she got liposuction, I just assumed that would be a secret. And then . . . it wasn’t!” Lawrence continued, “It’s a part of her—I hate using this word—relatability. In some ways, it’s benefitted her. Look at her obviously successful career.”
Gene’s birth happens with a camera in the room in “Expecting Amy,” which documents Schumer’s experience of enduring a sixty-show tour while suffering from endometriosis and hyperemesis, a condition that causes women to throw up violently throughout their pregnancy. (As an expert explains in the series, “You just vomit to the point where you can’t breathe, and it just doesn’t stop.”) We see Schumer vomit in a podcast taping, during a Pilates workout, in the back seat of a car, in hotel and hospital rooms across the country. At one performance, she brings a wastebasket onstage. Before another, she throws up so forcefully that she bursts the blood vessels in one eye—“So that’s good for camera,” she deadpans. It’s difficult to imagine Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Tina Fey allowing fans to see them onscreen without makeup, let alone permitting this level of intimacy. “I don’t know why I don’t have any boundaries,” Schumer told me. “I just don’t.”
When Schumer was eight months pregnant, she filmed a Netflix special in Chicago. At nearly nine months, she pitched “Life & Beth” in Los Angeles. Soon afterward, she had her C-section, which required three hours of surgery. “You really learn, men can’t do shit,” she says groggily to a camera outside the operating room. A nurse cautions, “You don’t want that on video,” to which Schumer replies, “I want that live broadcast.”
In Schumer’s early work, men were the clueless beneficiaries of a system that rewarded their idiocy and entitlement. For straight women, single life was a desperate, self-abasing attempt to get emotional and sexual needs met by people who cared only about their own penises. In the sketch “Real Sext,” Schumer sits in her pajamas, watching a romantic old movie, as she attempts to craft an alluring text. “I am so lonely all the ti—” she writes, then deletes it and starts again: “I would love another shot at giving you a blo—” When the guy she is texting ultimately informs her, “I just finished on your hair and head,” she replies, “Cool. I’m always here.”
The degradation continued at work. In her standup special “Live at the Apollo,” Schumer recalled that producers read her script for “Trainwreck” and, to her surprise, asked her to star in the film: “They were, like, We just need you to do three things: One, just be yourself. Two, have fun! And, three, stop eating food.” Her response: “I was, like, ‘You guys, I don’t even like food! I was just eating it because I was bored!’ ” But her compliance was fleeting. Schumer realized that she could earn more or less the same money touring and creating her own shows as she could acting in rom-coms. She’d have more control of what she made, and of what she ate.
When I visited Schumer, she was about to embark on a forty-two-city tour, which will run until 2023. Fischer is staying home with their son, in Brooklyn. “With our life and her career and with Gene, it’s not really a conversation,” he said. “She tells us what’s going on, and Gene and I, we’re happy and willing and able, so far, to adapt.” Fischer, the author of a James Beard Award-winning cookbook, has worked with Alice Waters and at the River Café in London, and for two years ran what the Times called the best restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard. (The Obamas went there on a date during his Presidency.) He is now planning a second book, about cooking at home. “You can’t have a restaurant—or be in restaurants—and have a functioning family,” he said. “And Amy is the hardest-working person I’ve ever met. Like, she doesn’t stop.”
“This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever made,” Schumer said, smirking, as she watched an edit of a new sketch—“Murder in Fart Park”—on her phone. She was on the campus of Manhattanville College, eating hummus and tortilla chips with her makeup artist and her hair stylist, as they prepared to film an episode of “Inside Amy Schumer.” (The show went off the air in 2016; the new season will appear on the streaming service Paramount Plus.) The sketch was based on a broad premise: a public green space where New Yorkers could come together to release everything toxic they had pent up during the pandemic. But Schumer wanted precision. She e-mailed her executive producer, “Farts could use some work, be more specific.” He wrote back quickly to assure her that what she’d heard were merely “placeholder farts.”
Schumer had a little time before going on camera, so she went over to see her friend Amber Tamblyn, a regular on “Inside Amy.” In Tamblyn’s trailer, Schumer recalled, “The first time I met you, you were walking down a street in midtown, and I was, like, ‘Hi, Amber,’ and you just lifted up your shirt and you had no bra on, and I was, like, ‘I love you.’ ”
“That sounds right,” Tamblyn said. She told Schumer that she’d just finished watching “Life & Beth”: “I feel like this is a new avenue for you. I was, like, ‘This is the Amy I know.’ ”
In her early standup, Schumer embodied a knowing, brassy, bemired persona—the last woman at last call. (“That’s when I shine!”) In sketches, she tended to play a hopeful, baffled innocent, trying to accommodate whatever ignominy came her way. In one, a boy band serenades Schumer: “Girl, you don’t need makeup / you’re perfect when you wake up!” She cheerfully washes her face, only to find the singers horrified by her actual appearance. As they harmonize about how she needs to cover her face in cosmetics, Schumer tells them, “I’m trying.”
Schumer’s jaded avatar and her naïve one were caricatures, self-parody. In “Life & Beth,” which she created, she plays a quieter, more melancholy person. “Is life worthless?” her character, Beth, asks a friend in one episode. “Girl, life is trash,” the friend replies. Beth is uninspired by her work as a wine sales rep; she’s unhappy in her relationship; and she is grieving the loss of her mother. (“I’m always dead,” Schumer’s mother, Sandy, told me. “ ‘Trainwreck’: dead. This one: dead.”) Disenchanted with her routine, Beth falls in love with a farmer—based on Fischer, and played with amusing bluntness by Michael Cera.
Beth’s youth is revealed in flashback: her comfortable Long Island life disintegrates after her family abruptly goes bankrupt. The story mirrors Schumer’s own. Her father, Gordon, was a funny, charismatic hustler, who had a business importing high-end baby furniture from Italy. For a while, the family thrived: rented planes, weekly lobster dinners. But Gordon had a drinking problem that he kept hidden. Eventually, the business foundered. “I don’t remember how it felt to lose everything, but I do remember men coming to take my dad’s car when I was ten,” Schumer wrote in “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo,” her memoir from 2016. “I watched him standing expressionless in the driveway as it pulled away.” At around that same time, Gordon was given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. He now uses a wheelchair, suffers from memory loss, and resides in a care facility in lower Manhattan. He and Schumer speak every day, often more than once.
While she was on set, Gordon called on FaceTime. “Happy Wednesday, Dad,” she said. “Have you watched my Hulu show yet?”
“I’m getting there,” he told her. Schumer asked what he was waiting for. “God to arrive,” Gordon said.
“She’s coming, trust me,” Schumer replied. Then she brought up the show again: “You should watch it. I mean, it’s about you.” Her father’s face vanished from the screen. “He hangs up first every time,” she said, shaking her head. “He came to the première. Maybe he doesn’t want to see the reënactment of the family he lost.”
As in Schumer’s own life, Beth’s parents split up, and her mother gets together with the (married) father of Beth’s best friend—the first in a string of men, who come and go from the increasingly crummy apartments that she shares with her children. (Schumer’s sister, Kim Caramele, told me, “I’m pretty sure we lived in nine different places before I graduated from high school.”) As Beth’s father tries to maintain a relationship with the daughters he can no longer support, his drinking grows worse. Beth starts pulling out her hair, strand by strand, until she has a bald patch, which her peers handle with the special cruelty of the young. “I didn’t like Long Island,” Schumer told me. She grew up in Rockville Centre, a middle-class village in Nassau County, where kids called her Amy Jewmer and threw pennies at her. “The diocese was in our town,” Schumer said. “Everybody who wasn’t really Irish Catholic, they were, like, ‘You’re not one of us.’ ”
To this day, Schumer has a bald spot on top of her head—“A yarmulke would cover it,” she told me. Trichotillomania was the one secret that even she found unspeakable. “The vulnerability of people knowing I pull my hair out, it feels very raw to me. . . . It’s, you know, bald spots,” she said. “It’s, like, that’s what a monster and a goblin have.”
Schumer has often presented herself in her comedy as monstrous. In what she considers the funniest sketch from “Inside Amy,” she records voice-over for an animated movie, which her agent describes as “like ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ but with meerkats.” In the studio, Schumer sits perky and eager behind a microphone, as animated avatars emerge for her co-stars, Jessica Alba and Megan Fox. Jessica Meerkat is “pretty and nice,” Megan Meerkat is “sexy, but I love math”; both are clad in boots and tight little outfits. Suddenly, Schumer’s character appears: enormous, bucktoothed, and cross-eyed, wearing only a shirt that doesn’t cover her enormous stomach or her alarmingly red vagina. “Why doesn’t my meerkat have any pants?” Schumer asks the producer. “Our animation team is out of Japan, and they don’t have anybody as big as Dumpy the Frumpy Meerkat over there,” he says. “So they literally couldn’t figure out how to make pants fit on you—they couldn’t even, you know, fathom it.” Then her meerkat starts pooping, while the two hot meerkats look on, appalled.
As Schumer takes in the situation, her face appears to deflate—the triumphal joy replaced by panicked recognition. Her sister, Kim, who came up with the sketch, said, “That moment where Amy, who has actually let herself feel good for a sec, realizes that this is who she is to people . . . it’s crushing. I’m laughing now, thinking about her face.” Schumer’s character is horrified and humiliated but ultimately accedes to the demands of the men in the room. “I think Amy is particularly skilled at demonstrating how women are expected to just roll with the punches,” Kim said. In Schumer’s comedy, her complicity in her own degradation is often the crowning absurdity, the last laugh.
Dumpy the Frumpy Meerkat conjures the terror most women feel at some point that they are irredeemably hideous. It also summons the vitriol with which Schumer’s appearance has been attacked on the Internet. Her response has been sometimes defiant—“I say if I’m beautiful,” she wrote in her book, “you will not determine my story”—and sometimes self-lacerating, in a way that’s funnier but not necessarily less brutal than the trolls online. In “The Leather Special,” Schumer talks about seeing a paparazzi shot of herself paddleboarding: “I was, like, ‘Oh, my God—Alfred Hitchcock is alive and loves water sports!’ ” She describes herself in the same routine as a “Thanksgiving-parade float of Tonya Harding.” Her current set includes a joke comparing her body to the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s.
“Loving yourself physically—I said all that when I was, like, twentysomething,” Schumer told me. “I got a little ahead of myself. It was easy to say I was hot then, because . . . I was.” At forty-one, Schumer said, “I vacillate between feeling really beautiful and special and just that I look like a monster.”
Schumer has always considered herself a feminist. (In her senior thesis at Towson University, she wrote about the male gaze in “Madame Bovary.”) In recent years, she has become—like much of Hollywood, corporate America, and the Democratic Party—increasingly outspoken on other issues of social and racial justice. Amid her C-section jokes, she notes that Black women in America are three times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or in childbirth. She frequently mentions her position of privilege. “I get it—white women are the worst,” she recently said on LeBron James’s podcast “Uninterrupted.” “I hate myself. Trust me.” Depending on your point of view, this is either a welcome emphasis on the structural inequities inherent in American life or a grating form of virtue signalling from a member of the élite.
But, even as detractors fault Schumer for excessive enlightenment, another camp has condemned her for insensitivity. Schumer co-hosted this year’s Oscars, at which, of course, Will Smith smacked Chris Rock. (“Did I miss anything?” she asked, when she came back on camera afterward.) Rock is one of Schumer’s closest friends, and the director of her special “Live at the Apollo”; when she posted on Instagram that she was “triggered and traumatized” by the incident, she was pilloried as a Karen. A few years earlier, the Internet had erupted with objections when Schumer and the cast of “Snatched”—Goldie Hawn, Wanda Sykes, and Joan Cusack—made a video imitating Beyoncé’s “Formation.” In 2015, Schumer was accused in the Washington Post of perpetuating a “worldview that justifies a broken immigration system, mass incarceration, divestment from inner city communities, that rationalizes inequality and buttresses persistent segregation and violence,” because of jokes like “Nothing works a hundred per cent of the time, except Mexicans.”
Arguably, Schumer was making fun of an exploitative system. But it’s a joke that she would never tell today. “It’s horrible,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It’s totally racially insensitive and lazy.” Moments later, she added, “Like white people.”
Schumer, who calls herself a “lightning tower for male rage,” has a way of affronting people with both a sin and its opposite. She has been attacked as insufficiently beautiful to be in entertainment, and also as too thin to make fun of her own appearance. “I know,” she said. “I really annoy people.”
At its sharpest, Schumer’s social commentary takes bracing, unexpected turns. A few days after the massacre in Uvalde, I saw her do a set at the Fat Black Pussycat, in Greenwich Village, where she frequently performs when she’s not travelling. “You know what you never hear after a mass shooting?” she asked the fifty or so people who had gathered in the dank, airless space on a weekday afternoon. “Was it a guy or a girl?”
“I think she walks a line between subversive and mass appeal in a way that a lot of people can’t,” Schumer’s friend Bridget Everett, a comic and cabaret performer who stars in the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” said. “I’m friends with a lot of people who are downtown performance artists who don’t really have mainstream appeal. She’s able to do her thing and still play arenas.” On one hand, jokes about what women endure—in childbirth, at work, in bed—are fundamentally feminist. On the other, observational humor about the compromises of marriage is a mainstay of the most conventional comedy, from “I Love Lucy” to “Everybody Loves Raymond.” For every weird joke Schumer tells—“Does anybody else have trouble remembering what kind of cancer their grandparents died from?”—there is another that could fit comfortably on any sitcom about domesticity: “We have found that the best day of the week to have sex is tomorrow.”
Schumer’s audience is still huge, but the demographics have changed. “There was a wider net at the beginning, when she got labelled a sex comic,” Kevin Kane, her producing partner for the past decade, said. Schumer established herself as a road comic opening for Jim Norton and Dave Attell, whose audiences were typically young, drunk, and male. (Attell remains Schumer’s favorite standup. She named her son Gene Attell Fischer, but then realized, weeks later, that the name sounded dangerously close to “genital fissure.” Gene’s middle name is now David.) “The boys I grew up being friends with are troublemakers,” Schumer said. “Attell—he’s like my dad. A lovable degenerate.”
When Schumer started headlining shows, her audiences tended to be evenly split between men and women. “I was always shocked that guys were watching,” she told me. Her comedy was often driven by outrage at the way men got to assess women’s bodies—but it’s difficult to satirize the objectification of hot women onscreen without showing hot women onscreen. (In Schumer’s sketch “Milk Milk Lemonade,” women rap, “I’m gonna make you scream and shout for the part of my body where poop comes out!” and the camera zooms in on twerking tushes: something for everyone.) As Schumer has aged onstage, the body has remained a major subject, but she now focusses more on the way it disintegrates with motherhood than on the way it’s seen by men. These days, she told me, she is speaking directly to a female audience. “Everything I do—well, not everything, I’m in a mayonnaise commercial, but everything else—is to try and make specifically women feel better.” Or, as she put it during her set at the Montreal comedy festival this July: “Chappelle’s fans are young and spry. My fans don’t get their periods anymore.”
In Schumer’s most recent special, “Growing,” she tells a story about how her sister and her husband went to a paint-your-own-pottery shop while she lay in a hospital bed, getting I.V. fluids after five hours of vomiting. Kim returned with a brightly colored ceramic mermaid. Fischer brought a portrait of his wife that he had painted on a plate, which he presented to her with pride. It looked like a child’s rendering of a blond walrus. (“You know what the sad part is?” Schumer said later. “The more I look at it, the more I’m, like, ‘It’s good.’ ”) The painting, she suggested, was a microcosm of marriage, both the bad news and the good: your spouse gets to see you as you actually are.
Years ago, Schumer told Barbara Walters that she didn’t expect to get married and have kids: “I would love those things, but I don’t really see it for myself.” As a touring comedian, Schumer travelled more than half the year, and it seemed impossible to imagine a husband who would tolerate her absence, let alone a child who could endure it. In her current set, Schumer advises audiences, “You have to find someone who can stand you.”
On the morning Schumer was leaving home to go on the road, she was anxious and a little grim. “I always want to cancel everything,” she said, “and I always try.” Her first stop was in L.A., to film a part in her friend Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie. (She’d attempted to weasel out of it, but he’d persuaded her to come.) After that, her standup tour loomed. “It’s sixty shows!” Schumer said. “A big tour is like forty.”
Fischer handed her a gloppy smoothie. “The thing that weighs on me is being away,” she told him.
“We’ll come with you a lot,” Fischer promised.
“I know. But travelling at this age . . . routine is so good for them,” Schumer said, watching Gene run around the coffee table in a diaper. “I’m anticipating how awful it’s going to be saying goodbye to him, like, the third time I leave to go on the road. When you hear them cry and reach for you, you just want to throw up.”
The previous evening, Gene had fallen asleep on top of her. As Schumer lay on the couch, watching the sun set with her son splayed across her chest, she worried. “There are a limited number of nights where they’ll want to do this,” she said. She had watched Seinfeld’s children go from snuggling with their mother constantly to becoming normal teen-agers who don’t care to be handled. “My mom is always sneaking little touches,” Schumer said. “And I’m, like, ‘Mom, get off. ’ ” She looked bleak. “I’m going to miss sixty-five nights of putting him to bed. I mean, what is that worth? Am I crazy for doing this? But then it’s, like, I have the opportunity to go and make all this money.” It was going to be worth roughly ten million dollars, she said, to complete what she’d named the “Whore Tour.”
When we first met, I had asked Schumer what she loved about standup. “If you have a bunch of ideas that you think are really funny, and you get to be in a room with people who want to listen to what you’re saying . . . it’s like if you have a story you can’t wait to get home to tell your husband,” she’d replied, with palpable pleasure. “When you have a great set, it’s like that: ‘I’m going to get up there, and I have so much to say to these people, and I’m going to make them laugh.’ ” She had described it as an irresistible compulsion to reveal oneself with ever greater specificity and creativity.
I asked her if this tour was really just about money—a lot of money. As Gene sucked on his pacifier in his sleep, Schumer looked at me like I was mentally ill: “You mean, like, is it for the love of comedy?” ♦
