Chasing Amy Schumer’s rapid rise to comedy stardom

The buzz around Amy Schumer reached fever pitch this week, leading up to the release of her first feature, Trainwreck, which she wrote and stars in. Here, an opening-weekend look at the rapid rise of the raunchy comedian, bringer of viral sketch videos an

If promotion is an art, Hollywood isn't so much its genius as its pantheon of deities, the fount from which attentiongrabbing springs. Still, even the most Athenian of PR specialists couldn’t have planned the wave of attention that’s grabbed Amy Schumer the last few months, cresting so beautifully with the release of her debut feature, Trainwreck, this weekend.

Though her career has been on a steady rise since Comedy Central plucked her from the other also-rans of Last Comic Standing, it wasn’t even a year ago that Schumer still just a solid comedy second-liner, namesake of reasonably successful sketch show with occasional bouts of virality, probably not even the most famous or think-pieced of that surprisingly robust stratum. That assessment just seems churlish in light of the last three months: starting with a well-earned MTV Movie Awards hosting slot, and an even more well-deserved Peabody, Schumer has become one of those expectionally rare comedians on whom almost everyone has (or should have) an opinion, a staple runner of the next-day “you have to see Amy Schumer take on [blank]” content treadmill; her current status is somewhere between mouthy magazine cover star and feminist philosopher queen.

There’s not much sense in reasoning with the zeitgeist, but it’s tempting to ascribe at least part of Schumer’s ascension to a sharpening of her knives when dissecting how media treats the modern woman: the third season of Inside Amy Schumer, particularly the early episodes, featured some of her strongest bits, both in their execution and in the forcefulness of the ideas animating them. In fairness, though, they’re really only subtle evolutions from undercurrents she’s been playing in since the show’s beginning, albeit to smaller audiences. Among the sketches that landed her on the viral watch list were “Last F--kable Day,” which eviscerated the end of actresses’s erotic desirability with a celebrity-laden celebration of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s “last f--kable day,” and the episodelength parody “Twelve Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” featuring character actors including Paul Giamatti and Jeff Goldblum debating whether she is hot enough for Hollywood. Both clever and profane, they’re nevertheless different mostly because of the star power Schumer is now able to draw into her orbit — she’s said both of those things (in mildly less ambitious ways) in the 20 episodes before, too. Given the fitful ascendance of feminism among youth and in the respectable quarters of the Internet, it’s not even really a matter of people being willing to listen, as being suddenly aware of what she’s been saying.

Still, there is some kind of victory even in this, that Schumer can remain unadulterated and still attract the most powerful spotlights — particularly since her ideas are so intimately tied into her comedy, given really almost no cover, other than being quite funny. Plenty of stars these days are happy to beat a feminist drum in interviews and at award shows, but relatively few, even among other comedians, are wrestling with it in such direct, contemporary ways in their actual work. From picking apart the subtle art of automatically deflecting compliments to unabashedly (and, to a degree, exaggeratedly) discussing her sex life with proud abandon, nearly everything she says on her show and on stage openly addresses how women live now, and how often they explicitly and implicitly get the s--t end of the stick, still.

Even if she’s among the most tightly intertwined with feminist ideas, one of the more remarkable things about Schumer’s time in the sun is that she’s among the first women — particularly in comedy but really in any field — to not actually be there alone. One of the tropes of female stardom that hasn’t attended Schumer’s rise is the regressively persistent “only (funny) woman on earth” vibe that has attached itself to a lot of her recent predecessors in the centre of attention. Not only has the coverage of Schumer mercifully resisted most hints of the “why aren’t there more funny women” canard — even as former Disney CEOs have kept this nonsense up — but at virtually no point has it been assumed that Schumer speaks for all or even most women: she’s possibly the first woman to be de-facto treated like she has a point of view, not the point of view.

You can see this even in the recent spate of criticism that emerged around Schumer’s “blind spot” on race. Even her allies are not afraid to pick apart her messages, not worried that by pointing out perceived flaws they risk blotting out a higher idea, nor lulled into contentment by the mere blessed presence of someone, anyone saying one particular thing that needs saying, whatever else they’re overlooking.

Some of that is just the increasing prevalence of a diverse array of voices in niche areas, but no doubt a degree of the confidence comes from the fact you can also find a degree of this diversity in the mainstream, too. Schumer is not even the only freewheeling, confident female voice on her own traditionally male network (praise be to Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana), nor has her mere presence really eclipsed the other, alreadyexisting voices, even if most of Tina Fey’s newsmaking in the last few months has involved commenting or supporting Schumer. As much as that’s a societal shift, Schumer has done her part, too, whether that’s drawing in the likes of Fey, Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette for that “f--kable” sketch, surrounding herself with other women writers (most notably co-executive producer Jessi Klein) or giving showcases to voices like Tig Notaro (in an earlier season) or Bridget Everett (whose cabaret parody closed the most recent one).

None of this is an endpoint of any kind — however blind Schumer might be on race, for instance, the people who write her cheques remain significantly blinder — but it is at least encouraging that even someone in the highest gears of the Hollywood publicity machine can still have her voice emerge; it’s even more encouraging that the voice is rightly situated as one of many, however loud it might be for the moment. We can only hope that she remains in the chorus when her time at the head of it is done.

June 1, 2004

With a new theatre B A , Amy Schumer makes her standup comedy debut on her 23rd birthday at Gotham Comedy Club in New York City Afterwards, she watches the tape of the show and is mortified by her performance “It was kind of like there was nowhere to go but up,” she later

said

2004 – 2007

She spends the next few years honing her craft at New York clubs She would get a tape of each show, watch it on a display TV at a Best Buy and take notes on her performance

June 13, 2007

Schumer’s TV break comes with an appearance as a contestant on Last Comic Standing, where she eventually won over judges with her raunchy and irreverent privileged blond-girl stage persona — although not enough to win the show She came in fourth Apparently reality shows might not be the best way to find future stars after all

June 29, 2007

An appearance on Live at Gotham for Comedy Central marks the start of a close relationship between Schumer and the network

Sept. 19, 2007

Ellen DeGeneres takes notice of the emerging comedian and invites her onto her show “She saw (Last Comic Standing) and she brought my name up, which is like, that just made my life,” Schumer told Buddy TV at the time “That feels like the best thing that’s happened so far ”

Jan. 29, 2010

On the comedy club circuit, Schumer moves up from opening for comics such as Jim Norton to headlining She’s selected by John Oliver to perform a set on John Oliver’s Stand Up Special alongside Marc Maron, Maria Bamford and Hannibal Buress

April 2, 2010

Schumer stars in the half-hour TV special Comedy Central Presents, a comedy milestone

Sept. 19, 2011

Comedy Central persuades Charlie Sheen’s people to include a still-unknown Schumer in his televised roast, where she steals the show, and makes headlines for a dig at a fellow panellist, Jackass star Steve-O Referring to his co-star Ryan Dunn, who was killed in a drunk driving accident that Steve-O was also in, she said: “I am — no joke — sorry for the loss of your friend Ryan Dunn I know you must have been thinking, ‘It could’ve been me ’ And I know we were all thinking, ‘Why wasn’t it?’ ” The appearance helps to set the stage for her show, Inside Amy Schumer, still two years away, but already in development Steve-O still has yet to get his own show

April 25, 2011

Schumer releases Cutting, a CD of her standup, which kicks off with the joke: “I finally just slept with my highschool crush But now, he like, expects me to go to his graduation ”