As Amy Schumer evolves, so does her stand-up act
WASHINGTON — In the middle of her dynamic show at the Verizon Center here on Friday, Amy Schumer swigged from a bottle of wine like a movie pirate and asked, “Can I just tell you guys all my secrets?”
Giving an arena show the intimate feel of a sleepover requires the presence of a star, and Schumer doesn’t pretend she isn’t one. “It’s been an insane year,” she said early on. “I’ve gotten very rich, famous and humble.”
When she soberly brings up her “passion project,” she’s referring to her appearance in those ubiquitous Bud Light ads. “People say you sold out for money,” she said midstride, before stopping and flashing a look that announced: Duh.
Schumer was a gleefully raunchy comic who found a pointed feminist voice on her Comedy Central sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer.” But in her new global tour, which comes to Madison Square Garden next month, she has slyly found an arena stand-up language to match her evolving reputation.
Schumer smuggles social commentary about gender into broad crowd-pleasing bits. At one point Friday, she lay down onstage, took off her high heels and invited a guy in the audience to try them on. After she flirted with him onstage, he stepped into the shoes and teetered awkwardly. Then she ordered him to walk around like she had, which he tried to do, uneasily. A man stumbling in woman’s shoes is an easy joke, but this bit of crowd work evoked the old line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, except backward and in heels. It got a huge response, but around me, the women laughed louder.
The most significant shift in her stand-up is one of perspective. Her early work used the voice of a blinkered, entitled party girl who often said dumb and offensive things, many of which were self-evidently false. And yet there were moments when a different voice interrupted for a punch line that broke the fourth wall, like the one-liner: “My best friend is black … in this story.” The early criticism of Schumer’s work came from comedy snobs who dismissed her jokes as character comedy, shorthand for material rooted in a fake persona, an approach deemed by some to be inferior to standup in your own personal voice.
Schumer repeatedly called herself an awful famous person onstage here. “I say what I mean,” she said, “so I probably won’t be able to do this much longer.”
It’s unclear exactly what she meant, but it’s the kind of intriguing aside that makes you sit forward in your chair. In comedy, meaning what you say doesn’t beat saying it in a meaningful way.