Ironic Performativity: Amy Schumer's Big (White) Balls

Abstract

The essay examines Amy Schumer's breakout performance in the controversial Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen to unpack and theorize the workings of ironic performativity. The essay offers processual language (the doing of racism, the doing of sexism, etc.) correctives for audiencing, naming, and making sense of layered ironic performances to foster more complex audiencing practices and engage the work with greater critical scrutiny and possibility. The analysis underscores the necessity of critical self-reflexivity in the processing of ironic comedy, as audiences are co-authors and co-owners of the meanings produced in this work (whether offense, laughter, subversion, or potentiality).

Keywords:

• Irony
• Performativity
• Aesthetics
• Satire
• Humor

Notes

[1] When coupled with satire, understood as a genre that seeks to perform a moral critique and corrective to point out faults or failings (Colletta; Kreuz and Roberts; Nelson), irony is used for critical/rhetorical ends. While irony without satiric content is hollow (Colletta 859), irony offers a range of performative methods for enacting satiric critique. Whether building empathy (Nelson), bridging identification with audiences (Nachman), disarming an audience (Gilbert), placing offensive language out there to be dealt with (Nachman), or opening up taboo or dangerous connections and opportunities through laughter, ironic satire operates on multiple levels that audiences might not even be aware of fully—or at least be able to articulate easily (Nachman). At its best, satire holds up a mirror to our faults and confronts them with scorn and ridicule (Colletta). Such an approach troubles the simplified equation that laughing at a joke merely and only strengthens an oppressive meaning. Within the laugh is a broad range of potential knowledges and understandings, which this essay traces through the workings of ironic performativity.

[2] Much of Schumer's comedy, especially her very successful television show on Comedy Central (Inside Amy Schumer), deals with shame and gendered norms. Her material is strongly informed by Susan Pelle's analysis of the stand-up comedy of Margaret Cho (26), and the relationship Cho builds with her audience. The Sheen roast, however, presented a different context and Schumer's explorations with shame were notably and necessarily absent, for the looming presence of the highly masculine dais and the central positioning of Sheen limited what she could do (while enabling other types of work). Although overt negotiations of power struggle and affective resistance were pronounced, there was a lack of a space of trust and vulnerability for her to delve into issues of shame in the manner she could in a one-woman performance (where the audience is there for her and she is in control of the setting and the context).

[3] Booth argues the complex demands irony places upon the reader lead us to a place where “modern critics have tended to stress the value of diversity in interpretation, and they have had no difficulty finding innumerable examples of conflicting interpretations by responsible and sensible readers, and of conflicts between such readers and the stated intentions of authors” (48).