Amy Schumer and the limits of popular (white) feminist self-branding

ABSTRACT

In this essay, Mattis explores these competing political dimensions of Amy Schumer’ comedy. Specifically, she argues that her comedy and persone index a new popular form of resistance that circulates feminist parody and satire in a variety of mainstream media contexts. However, she also argues that Schumer’s work is premised on a limited feminist sisterhood as a result of her self-branding practices and performative racial myopia, both which short circuit radical, intersectional critique.

KEYWORDS:

• White feminism
• parody
• satire branding
• racial myopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Last Comic Standing is a popular reality series in the United States that stages competitions among comedians who displayed their talents in front of scouts. Winners receive a contract with the network NBC. It ran primarily between 2003–2010, but then aired again in 2014 and 2015.

2. Mostly Sex Stuff and The Leather Special (2017) are specials that showcase Schumer’s stand-up comedy. Both specials highlight how Schumer ascended to large-scale arena comic status.

3. Inside Amy Schumer (2013–2016) is an American comedy series that is comprised of sketches, vignettes, and interviews. The material is provocative, often sexual or scatological, and it generally showcases the self-deprecating humour of Amy Schumer who is both the creator and star of the show.

4. See, for instance, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd’s piece in Jezebel ‘Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer Team Up for an Embarrassing Chat Among Friends.’ In it, Sheperd condemns Dunham and Schumer’s feminism on the basis of their exchange on Dunham’s newsletter Lenny; she asserts that ‘the conversation feels like a corollary to the ongoing concept that personal self-empowerment is equal to feminism, that feeling good about oneself in a difficult and inequitable world is enough, and that doing so absolves one’s self of having to feel empathy or understanding of others.’

5. Many critics have theorised how comedy becomes a vehicle for interrogating social norms and evincing marginalised perspectives. Such public interrogations of social norms are premised upon the comic’s willingness to, as Oliver Double puts it, ‘uncover the unmentionable’ (Double 2014, p. 292). For Lawrence Mintz, all stand-up performers are marginalised and marked as inferior by the audience who asserts a kind of ‘superiority’ through laughter; however, in the audience’s overt or covert identification with the comedian one can ‘secretly recognize it as reflecting natural tendencies in human activity if not socially approved ones’ (Mintz 1985, p. 74). For comedians who are marginalised by virtue of their class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, comedy has long served as a platform for articulating harsh oppressions in a non-threatening social context. Ian Brodie argues that humour is ‘the revelation of (by the performer) or a reaction to (by audiences) a physical, intellectual, social, moral, or emotional incongruity that could just as easily elicit feelings of terror’ (Brodie 2014, p. 6). For Brodie, the comedians must use their narrative to cultivate a sense of marginalisation, but also concretise social relations with an audience ‘in terms of shared, overlapping, complementary, or – at times – contradictory social identities that exist independent of the performance relationship’ (Brodie 2014, p. 91). Through a ‘negotiation’ of incongruity, the comedian and audience establish a worldview (Brodie 2014, p. 7).

6. Gilbert problematises the conflation of women’s humour and feminist comedy. In fact, she does not categorise any kind of humour as ‘feminist’ as she sees this as essentialising. She rightly insists upon a consideration of complex rhetorical and contextual factors that compose a rhetorical event – the audience, life experience, material, etc. (Gilbert 2004, p. xv).

7. In addition to Gilbert and Mizejewski, earlier critics including, Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, provide a history of women’s subversive humour in a U.S. context

8. Taylor Nygaard, whom I cite later on, also interprets Schumer as disrupting the binary articulated Mizejewski’s book. Her essay smartly builds on Mizejewski’s theory in an analysis of Inside Amy Schumer skits that challenge the ‘postfeminist social contract’ (Nygaard 2018, p. 63). Though objectified on stage, female comics engaging in scatological stand-up are not positioned as desirable or ‘pretty’ by conventional patriarchal standards. In contrast, female leads in romantic comedies are allowed to be pretty because they are engaging in softer, more palatable forms of humour (Mizejewski 2014, p. 22–23).

9. In her introduction to the special issue on ‘Intimacy’ in Critical Inquiry, Berlant explores how certain intimacies defy a canonised and maturational ‘life narrative’ or narratives that assert the ontological imperatives of ‘domestic privacy.’ According to this narrative, the domestic space is supposed to be a haven from the competitive and exploitative public sphere (Berlant 1998, p. 4–5).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann M. Mattis

Ann Mattis is an Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at University of Wisconsin Green Bay. Her teaching and research interests are focused on domesticity, women's labor and work relationships, and, more recently, comedy. This project came out of research she did while a fellow at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for 21st Century Studies.