Schumer’s comic genius on full display in ‘Special’
Amy Schumer takes no prisoners in “The Leather Special,” an hour of hilarious, raunchy comedy available on Tuesday, March 7, on Netflix. The show, filmed in Colorado, gets its title from Schumer’s outfit — a clinging black leather one-piece. By now, you know that Schumer likes to talk about sex in the most direct terms. It’s not just the four-letter words, but an almost clinical commentary on every aspect of human coupling. But the reason we laugh isn’t just because she makes the proverbial stevedore seem like a Sunday-school teacher by comparison — it’s really about her timing, her way of landing a punch line with a bang, so to speak, and then tossing a little afterword over her shoulder. “I wish we were raised more like men,” she offers before pretending to imitate a man being coy and whiny in a sexual situation. “Men, you aren’t raised to hate yourself,” she declares. “Everything you do is a miracle.” The humor, of course, comes from how un-miraculous she thinks men really are. Schumer trades in opposites. If she says “men deserve more credit when it comes to sex,” doing all the work while women “don’t do anything,” she’s really skewering male attitudes about sex. Schumer talks a lot about sex in the special, but not exclusively. Perhaps the most brilliant sequence of “The Leather Special” is when she names the two young women killed in a Louisiana theater where Schumer’s film “Trainwreck” was showing in 2015. Their deaths are clearly not a subject for humor for Schumer. But after referencing the tragedy, she carefully manipulates the focus to the issue of gun control and adds little grace notes of humor that both break the tension and draw her audience into seeing some of the absurd loopholes in gun control laws. Just another example of Schumer’s comic genius, with a little bit of topical commentary thrown in as well.