Those who say that feminists have no sense of humor have clearly never watched Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central. The sketch show, which just finished its brilliantly hilarious second season and has been picked up for a third, skewers gender politics with a hand so deft that both women and men are laughing. To wit, the highly rated—for basic cable, at least—second-season premiere drew a higher Nielsen rating among males 18 to 34 than anything else on cable that night.
Why is Schumer’s show so successful? Partly it’s because her comedic persona is that of an unthreatening, insecure party girl. She buffers her incisive sketches with stand-up segments and person-on-the-street interviews that play off the bubbly, promiscuous, booze-loving cliché of modern single womanhood that she has cultivated as her onstage persona. This character is likable and relatable, even to a subset of people who would never want to be labeled feminist, and appreciated by those who like raunchy straight talk. Delivered by such a character, Schumer’s jokes are as easy to swallow as the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, except that the medicine is arsenic.
The show’s real strength is its satire, such as the skit in the second-season opener in which Schumer watches from behind one-way glass as a focus group dissects the show’s first season. The room is full of men, and none of them have anything to say about her comedy, commenting only on her appearance. The men would like more of her body and less of her “just so-so” face. They’re not sure if they’d DVR the show, but they’d definitely have sex with its star, but only if nobody could find out about it.
The sketch’s final punch line is that Schumer has heard the whole thing from behind the glass, and her sadly optimistic takeaway is “A couple of them said they would bang me.” The first layer of the joke is that the character of “Amy” is pathetic, happy just to be validated by men. But the subtext is that all women, no matter how competent they are, will always be judged by their looks first, and their worth is determined by their sexual desirability to men.
For years the responses to the hideously sexist “women aren’t funny” charge (famously led by bulwarks of sophisticated humor such as Jerry Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, and Adam Corolla) were gender-blind. Funny is funny, people would say. Who cares who wrote the joke, Tina Fey or Jerry Seinfeld? But Schumer is funny because she’s a woman.
A man couldn’t offer an insider’s critique on the ways women are taught to self-hate or self-deprecate the way Schumer does in sketches like “Compliments,” in which a group of friends deflect admiration from one another and put one another down instead. Or “I’m So Bad,” in which those same friends feel the need to berate themselves publicly for their unhealthy food choices, though they feel no remorse about the actual thoughtless ways they behave.
It’s also doubtful that a man would get the details right in “Sex Prep,” a skit lampooning the obscene amounts of time and money that women spend to appear sexy, spurred on by unrealistic expectations in the media and nonsensical women’s magazine articles. (“Hair Down There? Kill Yourself,” screams one headline in the sketch.)
But Schumer is also able to coax humor out of more serious, institutional instances of sexism. In “A Very Realistic Military Game,” Amy plays a Call of Duty–like first-person shooter, except that, because she chooses to play as a woman character, instead of tracking and killing bad guys, her avatar endures a rape by a fellow serviceperson.
She is then forced to play a level that’s all bureaucratic paperwork because she pressed charges against her attacker. (“Did you know he had a family? Does that change your mind about reporting?” asks an all-too-realistic game narrator.) After an in-game military trial, in which her avatar is a victim of character assassination, her rapist is returned to active duty. It’s a criticism of not just the military’s terrible history of response to sexual assault but also the bro culture of the gaming world.
For decades, televised sketch comedy was relegated to Saturday Night Live, which has long thought itself much more subversive than it is. But sexism abounded at SNL’s Studio 8H; original cast member Jane Curtain told Oprah Winfrey a few years ago that John Belushi tried to sabotage sketches written by women in the early years of the show, and Norm MacDonald told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast that he nixed the idea of doing “Weekend Update” “with a lady” during his tenure behind the news desk.
So it is heartening to see the art form flourish on Comedy Central, not just with Schumer’s excellent show but also with the biracial comedy team Key Peele’s self-titled program, which will also return in the fall with almost double the number of episodes of last year. This moment represents a sort of renaissance for televised sketch comedy, and it is especially encouraging that it is being led by those outside the “white dude” comedy hegemony. After all, the discrimination and gender and racial politics that inspire, aggrieve, and enrage artists like Schumer and Key Peele may be no laughing matter. But in the hands of skilled comedy writers, they sure can be funny.
Article source: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/06/09/who-says-feminists-arent-funny-blowing-glass-ceiling-sketch-comedy