It’s been a booming few years for Amy Schumer, who went from being a relative unknown on Last Comic Standing to the creation of Inside Amy Schumer last year, which was recently renewed for a third season, and she’s even written a movie with Judd Apatow.
In Toronto for the Just for Laughs 42 festival, before her particularly dirty brand of humour got started, she was introduced by Gerry Dee, the Canadian comic who was her competitor on Last Comic Standing. He joked about her being not nice (her birthday texts to him are always apparently “Happy birthday loser”) and then gave the audience a hilarious-yet-serious warning for men to not witness their wives giving birth in the hospital.
Once Schumer got on stage, barely a few seconds could go by before the audience was roaring with laughter. She began by telling the audience she was happy to be in Toronto, “a place where I’m considered attractive.”
Brutal honesty and self-deprecation are the two cornerstones of Schumer’s schtick, After telling several jokes at her own expense, Schumer said “It’s okay, I was recently included in the Maxim top one billion.”
She told one particularly long, tangent-filled story of sitting courtside at an LA Lakers game, in which she ended up sitting near Kate Upton and right beside Diana Agron (Glee) and being nervous around “hot people.” Perhaps her funniest tangent involved describing beauty pageants.
She described them as being filled with hungry cadavers, who wear a sash proclaiming them to be from their sad state, who walk across the stage like they’re haunting it. But she had the audience squealing as she described the most dreaded aspect of the pageants — when the contestants are asked a question. She joked that the winners are usually the ones “who don’t end up blurting out the n-word.”
She also drew a lot of laughs by recounting a conversation between two men that she heard on the subway. It lasted all of 10 seconds, and apparently sufficed for the men’s entire ride. She said if women were having that conversation, people might think they were special needs.
She ended off her set with a bit of audience interaction, in which she looked to the crowd to supply her with names of sexual acts (Schumer supplied “the Abe Lincoln” and “the Houdini”). The audience replied in spades with names like “the Chicken Schnitzel,” “the Alaskan Pipeline” and the unforgettable “Crimson Pollock.” This reporter will not explain what any of those phrases mean.
She went off the stage to a standing ovation, then returned to recount a story about her friends getting older and losing their abilities to be dirty.
If every headlining act pulls off the laugh-a-second atmosphere of Schumer’s show, JFL42 will be a big success.
