Amy Schumer has found herself pitched aloft on the tides of Twitter after a ringing endorsement of her comedy in The Guardian was topped off with a paragraph about Schumer’s “blind spot around race.”
I respect Schumer! Still respect her!!! I think she’s funny, an important voice in comedy right now, and her show is often brilliant. I think the points leveled against her are somewhat legitimate and others can be (and have been) refuted, but I don’t wanna be here all night. So.
Here’s Amy’s response.
Every. Single. Time.
What is so hard about this, comics? Why can’t you address this sort of shit with some care and aplomb? Is it because comedians are so shitty to each other that you grow this prickliness, porcupine’d forever as a career security blanket? Is it that comedy is all you feel you’ve got, and if it’s attacked in any shape or form your fight-or-flight kicks in? Are you simply serving it up to your main demo, pissy fuccbois who wanna see you be mean to those quee blac femal disabl whiners?
Why do my heroes keep making me think I’m dumb for respecting them? I don’t want to be mean or ranty, but shit, I keep getting burned! Authors don’t do this to me! Musicians? Artists? They don’t give me the same trouble.
AMY! You don’t have to kick this off with an insult! Who opposed to you is going to calm down when you imply they’re setting themselves aflame in their anger? Who has ever received condescension with a refreshed smile, prepared to guzzle all the fluff you’ve wedged into these one-and-a-half screenshots? (He wrote, condescending to a famous comedian.)
But it is. It’s fluff with a capital F-FF, you may as well have written “I’ve synergized my workflow into laughter moving forward.” How do you expect people will read “I’m a devout feminist and lover of all people?” Feminism is intrinsically about not using it as a shield. How does your statement of faith (so “devout”) come across to people who feel marginalized? Who can take you at your word– anyone at their word– when you say that you’re a lover of all people? Are you Jesus? MLK? They’re the last ones who really got away with saying that shit, people believed them so hard they were killed over it. I don’t think you’re reaching martyr levels for your global touchy-feels yet.
How can you, one of our preeminent comic voices, a woman who I REALLY DO TRUST to tackle bitter subjects with grace, still collapse under the lightest scrutiny I’ve seen in a long time? Remember Tosh? Michael Richards? Trevor Noah? (Two of ’em still have lucrative careers, and I’m sure Kramer lives on an island he owns somewhere, snapping through doorframes with only the breeze to join him).
Because Amy, here’s a really obnoxious part: you have SO many white feminists behind you, nodding in assent because they don’t want their TV show stolen by the angry minorities who’re always complaining so much more, making the proper, pure-to-the-point-of-albinism feminists look bad. The whitefems try so hard all the time that, like, can’t they just have this? Ugh- They’re the exact sort of feminists who will take after your example, believing they can ward off criticism by saying “guys. I really do it good. Im the femsisnism,”
Here, Amy, I’m your new PR flack. (Ain’t it just like a dude to assume a gal needs help?)
I read Heisey’s article on me in The Guardian, and appreciated all the great shit she had to say about me. Great shit about me is always welcome, same as bad shit about me. We all know where my compliment box is, but my complaint box is also always open (and it’s not my ass). That said, I have to disagree to a point with Heisey’s claim that I have a ‘shockingly large blind spot around race.’ Her example of my race-based stand-up is out-of-touch. I haven’t had racial material in my act for the past two years because of what I’ve come to learn from my audiences and our society. That said, it was shitty that me and the writing team for the MTV Movie Awards couldn’t come up with anything less hacky & race-based for a bit that combined both Selma Hayek, an incredibly talented Latina actress, and Selma, a film about a moment so crucial to the story of civil rights in America. We’ll have to do better next time, and I understood the criticism that followed. Besides, I pissed off J-Lo. Who would dare cross J-Lo twice? Affleck did. Now he’s dead, I think. I hope.
Ultimately, I do what I can to relate the messages I think are important, and I try to hear everything you guys share with me. I love what we’ve been able to take on with the show, we seem to spark discussion about racism, sexism, & jism all the time, and it sounds like Heisey and most of you agree. I may not hit the mark every sketch or joke, but I want to prove I’m listening. So I’ll keep trying for that, and I’ll apologize now, and apologize again in the future I’m sure. And if you want the show to continue giving us a voice, if you want the episodes to keep coming, I need you to chant it with me now: KEEP COMING INSIDE AMY SCHUMER!! KEEP COMING INSIDE AMY SCHUMER!!
Hit me up on Venmo if you wanna post this, Amy. It won’t come cheap; despite my continued hopes, care is still a rare commodity in the comedy biz.
Wampoholic 