Amy Schumer's 15 Funniest Sketches
Note: This piece originally appeared on Virgin Media, but disappeared when they did a site revamp. It was written in August 2015.
Amy Schumer's 15 Funniest Sketches
You might not have heard of Amy Schumer, but the release of her comedy Trainwreck (directed by Judd Apatow) this week is set to change that. Her ever-increasing popularity is due, in large part, to her Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, which features excerpts from her stand-up shows and a series of brilliant sketches that take potshots at a number of cultural issues, from body image pressure to gender stereotyping, rape culture and sexism in Hollywood, alongside the standard subjects of relationships and sex. Fortunately, though the show doesn't yet air in the UK, the good people of Comedy Central have made her work available on YouTube, so here's an Amy Schumer crash course, with 15 of her funniest sketches.
1) 12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Schumer's crowning achievement to date is this brilliant parody of Sidney Lumet's black and white classic 12 Angry Men. Essentially a single sketch, but lasting the entirety of her 20 minute show, it features the likes of Paul Giamatti, Jeff Goldblum and John Hawkes as 12 jurors, only instead of debating whether or not a young man is guilty of murder, they're trying to decide whether Amy Schumer is hot enough to be on television. The genius of the sketch is that it hits all the beats of the classic film, from the surprise production of a certain object to a revealing emotional breakdown at the end. Inspired, and beautifully executed.
2) Last F**kable Day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Schumer's best short sketch to date is this brilliantly conceived skewering of sexism and double standards in Hollywood. While walking in the woods, Amy comes across three of her heroes, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who have come together to celebrate Julia's last f**kable day. As Julia explains, “In every actress's life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you're not beliveably f**kable anymore”, citing the example of Sally Field, who went from playing Tom Hanks' love interest in Punchline in 1988, to playing his mother just six years later in Forrest Gump.
3) Celebrity Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Amy's appearance as starlet Amy Blake Lively (ouch) on late night talk show Cliffley Lately (with the host played by Trainwreck co-star Bill Hader) is an almost painfully accurate send-up of the sexism and pandering of celebrity interviews with beautiful women. From the forced flirting with the host (“I've always had a little bit of a crush on you”) to the leering audience and the pandering to the openly masturbating fanboy crowd (“My favourite movie, I'm so embarrassed...is Star Wars...”), this is so spot-on that you'll never be able to watch an actual US talk show interview again without thinking about it.
4) Girl, You Don't Need Make-Up - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
If you've seen one Amy Schumer sketch in the past, the chances are it's this one, as it did the rounds on social media after it first aired. It's a very funny pastiche of a boy band pop video (basically, it's One Direction), in which they dance around Amy singing that she's so beautiful that she doesn't need make-up...until she takes her make-up off, at which point they change their minds (“Hold up, girl, we spoke to soon / With this whole no make-up tune...”) As with all the best musical parodies, it's also catchy as hell.
5) Operation Enduring Mouth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Another well-aimed dig at sexism in Hollywood, this spy movie sketch zeroes in on the fact that women in action thrillers are either side-lined or reduced to titillating sex objects. Receiving a brief for a top secret mission, her male counterpart (code name: Crossbolt) is given lots of thrilling espionage activities to do (rapelling down a building, hacking into a mainframe, that sort of thing), while Agent Amy's (code name: Butter Face) mission is to distract the enemy with oral pleasure.
A number of Schumer's sketches focus on the social interactions of women, often filtered through film and TV tropes. This one takes the idea that “women can't take compliments” to ridiculous extremes, with each of the women responding to compliments with ever more self-deprecating comments. (“Look at your little dress!” “Little? I'm like a size 100 now. I paid like $2 for it – it's probably made out of old Burger King crowns...”)
7) Multiple Personality Disorder - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Okay, so not all Schumer's sketches have important things to say about cultural issues. This one's just a very funny routine that takes the piss out of thrillers where a character has a multiple personality disorder. The joke is that Amy's character is terrible at accents, so although her disorder is real, she lacks the facility with the dialects and voices to be any good at it. “Basically, she sucks at having multiple personalities”.
8) POV porn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Lots of Schumer's sketches focus on sex from a female perspective and this one takes that idea to its logical conclusion, imagining what a woman's eye view of POV porn might look like.
9) You Can't Go In There - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This is another sketch that pokes fun at gender stereotyping, getting a surprising amount of comic mileage out of targeting secretaries in movies and TV shows whose only job appears to be to shout “You can't go in there!” as someone barges into her boss' office. The fact that the sketch appears to be set in the 1980s somehow makes it that much funnier.
10) Herpes scare - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
A recurring theme in Schumer's sketches involves her playing a version of herself as a selfish, thoughtless character who's only out for herself. In this sketch she tries to make a deal with God (played to perfection by the always excellent Paul Giamatti) after she finds out she might have herpes. (“Could I just, like, blow you?” “I'm gay....”)
11) Who's More Over Their Ex? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This send-up of a game show in which two people compete to see which of them is more over their ex is so good that you find yourself thinking that you'd actually watch the show if it really existed. The rounds include: ignoring a phone call from the ex, having a conversation with a mutual friend without mentioning the ex and changing your relationship status to single on Facebook.
12) Football Town Nights - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This is a great example of Schumer's gift for parody being used to stick the knife into an important social issue. On the surface, this sketch is an obvious parody of the TV show Friday Night Lights (right down to Schumer doing an expert rendition of Connie Britton's Texan accent), only it uses that vehicle to deliver a sizeable smackdown to rape culture, specifically the assumption of entitlement amongst high school athletes, with the football team and the entire town kicking up a fuss when the new coach (Josh Charles) institutes a No Raping policy. (“No raping? But coach, we play football!”)
13) He's Good-Looking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
A sharply observed sketch that centres on the idea that men are reluctant to admit that other men are attractive, with a side order of homophobia. When her boyfriend professes to have no opinion as to whether Channing Tatum is hot or not, Amy invents increasingly convoluted sexual scenarios, forcing him to choose between the attentions of Channing Tatum or Eugene Levy.
14) Sex Tips - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
A version of this sketch appears in Trainwreck, in which Amy's character works as a writer for men's magazine S'NUFF. In this sketch she plays the editor, pushing her staff of writers to come up with 500 new sex tips for the latest issue, all of which end in “....until he explodes”. The punchline comes at the end, with a news report that several men are suing the magazine after they were accidentally raped by their girlfriends after they followed the tips.
15) Sexting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Sexting has popped up in a number of Schumer's sketches, so it was a toss-up between this one and the one about the professional Sext Photographer (https://www.youtube.com/
posted by FilmFan @ 12:52 PM
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