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Zinoman on Amy Schumer

In case you missed the great Jason Zinoman profile of Amy Schumer--currently in the NYT--then here are a few things to know:

-There's a great Jason Zinoman profile of Schumer in the NYT.

-Zinoman wrote one of my all-time favorite books: "Letterman." Enthralling and weirdly literary--and it's about someone (Letterman) whose work I don't even like very much.

-Schumer insists that her now-abandoned racist comedy was a way of poking fun *at racists* -- "I was EMBODYING a fictional racist character." This doesn't totally seem plausible to me. When Schumer said, "I used to date Latinos, but now I prefer consensual sex" -- it wasn't clear, at least to me, that Schumer wasn't speaking as Schumer. And who would the airhead be? An airhead who had dated various Latino gentlemen, and had actually had consensual sex, but then mis-remembered the consensual sex as rape? This doesn't make sense to me.

-Zinoman correctly observes that Schumer has a "melancholy quality," and Schumer, instead of becoming defensive, absorbs this new idea. She is curious about it. I really like Amy Schumer's curiosity.

-Amy Schumer's big message is: "Try not to care so much about being popular." I think that that's empowering. You can't please everyone. Why worry so much about making that particular effort? I would have a better life if I tattooed Schumer's words to my forehead.

-Schumer herself, asked which crowd she ran with in high school, blithely answers: "The popular crowd." I love this about Schumer, as well: She *isn't* the standard outcast comic. She was well-liked in adolescence. She is able to confess this. Another small way in which she is just a bit unusual.

-It's also satisfying to see Schumer describe her critics: "The comics who aren't doing so well," "the mean voices on the Internet," "the right," "the left," "the people who thought that my message in I FEEL PRETTY was glib." Can you also say that you are fully clear-eyed about which people in the world dislike your work, and why? (And can you "shrug off" that stuff?)

-Finally, I'm delighted to learn Amy Schumer will film Stephen Karam's "The Humans," one of the smarter new plays I've seen on Broadway in recent years. Karam is a gay man from Scranton--an educator's son--and he happens to have made it big in the theater world. "The Humans" feels autobiographical: It's an account of a heartland family dealing with standard twenty-first century problems. There's so much love and so much honesty in the writing. I'm excited to see this movie.

*P.S. Schumer: "I always knew I would be famous." Who talks like that??? And the breath-taking self-confidence! "I'm reneging on this book proposal, because I know I'll command a much higher price in a few years." "This thing you're pitching? I'm not interested. Not at all." WOW!!
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