Schumer brings fresh voice to Hollywood

By Jake Coyle

AP Film Writer

NEW YORK

A recurring feeling has accompanied Amy Schumer’s rapid ascent in show business.

“It’s always: I walk in a room thinking maybe I belong in here,” she says over a plate of meatballs at a Greenwich Village cafe. “And then I get reminded quickly that I don’t. But then no one really does. And I’m going to do it again.”

It’s getting hard to find a room too big or too prestigious for the 34-year-old Schumer. In her rise to becoming one of the pre-eminent stand-ups in the country, Schumer has emerged as one of the sharpest, wittiest commentators on gender in America. Her humor — satirical, raunchy, absurdist — is built on a fresh and on-point feminism, alert to both the injustices of sexism and the helpless farce of the sexes.

She’s turned her Peabody-winning Comedy Central show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” into a spinning collider of gender roles, firing out weekly, instantly viral parodies of men and women, in bed and on screens.

In “Trainwreck,” a comedy she wrote and stars in due out Friday, Schumer wades into movies for the first time. Her arrival in Hollywood, like many of her punchlines, is well timed. Her voice feels particularly valuable to a movie industry wrestling with gender equality.

It’s a conversation Schumer has already joined, most notably in a sketch about the expiration date of sexual attractiveness for women in Hollywood. In it, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette toasted Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ final day.

Schumer’s introduction to the superficiality of Hollywood, she reckons, has already given her 20 minutes of new material. The jokes have included her expectation a more attractive actress, “a Kate” (like Kate Upton or Kate Middleton), would be cast in her place, and her insistence that her Los Angeles experience has proven she’ll never be a movie star.

“Definitely not,” she confirmed in a recent interview. “I’m not doing it. I don’t like anything that comes along with it. I don’t like it so much that I don’t know if I would ever do it again. I left the press junket like, ‘Stand-up’s cool.”’

Yet “Trainwreck,” directed by Judd Apatow, has already won glowing reviews for its crude humor and sweet authenticity. It flips the usual conventions of a romantic comedy. Schumer plays a serial dater and the men (Bill Hader, flanked by his protective friend, Lebron James) are the ones yearning for a second date.

It wasn’t a conscious inversion, she says, but is simply true to her experience. One of her most famous sketches, a full-episode version of “12 Angry Men” in which jurors weigh whether Schumer is hot enough for TV, also came from a blogger’s comments.

“I’m trying to do my part, just so people can feel comfortable in their own skin,” she says. “I don’t think we should throw out all the hot people. But people are actually OK with looking at people other than models. They actually kind of like it.”