All the ways Amy Schumer was so on point in her HBO special
Amy Schumer has Saturday nights working for her. Hot on the heels of her Saturday Night Live hosting gig, the comedian premiered her much-anticipated standup special Live at the Apollo yesterday. And she totally slayed! The subject material was expected — love, sex, body image, being a woman in Hollywood — but the jokes themselves were fresh, real and hilarious. It was like watching an episode of Inside Amy Schumer with commentary unfold live in front of our eyes.
There was the bit about male standards vs. female standards in Hollywood. Amy points to the movie Zookeeper, starring Kevin James and Rosario Dawson, and calls out the casting as unrealistic. Well, not so much the casting as the audience being forced to buy yet another story about an average Joe with a totally knockout leading lady. Amy jokes that of course the female actress needs to look a certain way, while it doesn’t really matter what the male actor looks like.
She also talked about being in love in your twenties, and how that blind optimism has faded for her. “Remember twenties love? You’re just so arrogant,” she said. “You’re like, ‘We’re so lucky we found each other. What are all these sad songs about?’” Then, she likens “twenties love” to the South Asian tsunami. So, that’s where her head’s at with dating right now.
And then there was this bit about her body. Amy commonly jokes that she’s a spy who was let in to the secret world of Hollywood to report back to us regular people about what it’s really like. She never misses an opportunity to remind us that what you see in movies and on TV is FAR from effortless.
Amy has gotten a look, firsthand, at just how far women will go to stay slim. “For breakfast you’ll have a smoothie, for lunch you’ll journal about that smoothie and then put a peanut under your pillow and you hope you dream about pizza,” she joked. “That’s the Hollywood Secret, I found out. They don’t put food in their faces.”
But probably best of all were just the times when Amy got real with us about herself. We love it when she throws in personal anecdotes about her childhood and life as Amy Schumer, funny human before she was Amy Schumer, comedian and actress. Right off the bat, she introduced the special with a home movie of toddler Amy singing, “I’m Amy and it’s my show.” It is your show, Amy—and as long as you’re performing, we’re watching.
(Featured image via HBO.)