by JONATHAN VAN METER|photographed by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
Teterboro Airport is located just twelve miles from midtown Manhattan in that uniquely unlovely part of New Jersey that gives the state a bad name. But it is the place one must go to if one is lucky enough or rich enough or famous enough to fly private. On a Thursday morning in late April, I meet Amy Schumer and her entourage in a lounge there to board Schumer’s rent-a-jet as she heads off on tour for the weekend, and as she walks through the lobby toward me to say hello—in yoga pants, a plaid flannel shirt, and an orange ski hat—her younger sister, Kim Caramele, who is trailing behind her, peels off and takes a seat on a sofa far across the room. Schumer sits down facing me and then suddenly notices her sister in self-imposed exile. “Kimberly! It’s weird for you to be sitting over there. We’re not doing an interview.” Kim walks over to introduce herself, and as she is saying hello to me, Amy says, “Shut up! I’m being interviewed!”
This reminds me of a famous Don Rickles gag. One night Rickles was having dinner in a swank restaurant with a pretty lady when he ran into Frank Sinatra and persuaded him to come say hello to impress his date. “Hello, Don. How are you?” said Sinatra as he dutifully dropped by their table, to which Rickles barked, “Can’t you see I’m eating, Frank?!” I bring this up to point out that, while the subject of much of Schumer’s stand-up material is radically, shockingly modern, in some ways she has more in common with the comics of stand-up’s golden years than she does with those of her own generation. Indeed, just after Joan Rivers’s death in 2014, Schumer gave a hilarious and moving speech in which she essentially said that Rivers was the reason she got into comedy. “I carried her with me for as long as I can remember,” she said that night onstage, choking up.
Turns out, Schumer knows that Rivers was my friend for 25 years, and as soon as we get settled on the plane, it’s the first thing she mentions. “When I heard she had died, I was like, ‘Well, that’s not possible.’ It really ****ed me up.” Just then, our flight attendant, Sahel, comes over to tell Schumer that they have her favorite Chardonnay onboard. “This is not a Chardonnay kind of day for me,” says Schumer, who has a nasty cold. I tell her about the time Rivers was on an overnight flight, and as it was about to land, the flight attendant leaned down to offer her breakfast. “Chicken and eggs?” said Rivers. “On the same plate? What is that, the mother-daughter special?” Schumer lets out a big laugh, as it is classic Joan but it is also a joke that could easily have come from Schumer’s brain. She is lightning fast and whip smart, a New York Jew with a copy of the Times tucked into her bag. Her worldview is surprisingly broad for someone who has made a career out of playing “the drunk sl*t” for laughs and talks about her p*ssy so much that anyone is now free to say that word on her network.
Despite the fact that Schumer’s much-anticipated memoir, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, for which she received a reported $9 million advance, comes out next month; and that her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, has in its four seasons changed the game of television and its rules (see above); and that Trainwreck, the Judd Apatow–directed comedy that she wrote and starred in, catapulted her to the top of Hollywood’s A-list, she is, above all else, a stand-up comic—arguably the most exciting and successful one working today. At the moment, she is in the midst of a six-week tour, filling 15,000-seat arenas, trying out new material and perfecting her act so that when she headlines Madison Square Garden for the first time, on June 23—the benchmark for any comedian who’s reached the big leagues—she will be battle-ready.
Schumer and I are sitting in plush leather seats facing each other. Kim, who is three and a half years younger and has brown curly hair, is across the aisle. The sisters laugh at each other’s jokes, bust each other’s chops, and finish each other’s sentences. They also write together: on Schumer’s TV show (in whose skits Kim sometimes appears) and on screenplays, including the one written with Jennifer Lawrence that they hope to start shooting in the next year. Indeed, Schumer and Lawrence will play sisters. (For the record, the most enviable girlmance in recent memory began when Amy posted a video of Jen talking about her on the red carpet. “I was just so excited that she knew who I was and liked me,” says Amy. Jen saw the post, emailed Amy, and said, “Maybe we could work together.” “That was all I needed: I just wrote six scenes and sent them.”) Amy glances over at Kim, who is slumped down in her seat, looking like she’d rather be in bed. “Can I have your scarf . . . ” says Amy, “without your attitude?” Kim laughs and hands it over.
“I just realized I’m not wearing a bra under my shirt, and it’s pulling, and I don’t want to put on a show.” She looks at me and leans closer. “I can tell you’re very attracted to me, and I don’t want that to affect this interview.” Kim is giggling under the hat she has now pulled down over her head. “Making Kim laugh is the best thing in the world,” says Schumer.
Amy and Kim’s older brother, Jason Stein, his wife, Cayce DuMont, and their two-year-old daughter, Ida, are meeting us at our first stop, in Minneapolis. Jason is a jazz musician whose trio opens for Schumer. “Luckily they’re talented,” she says. “Because it could have been horrible. But to be able to take your brother and sister with you? It’s the best. There’s no class distinction between the three of us. When I started making a bunch of money, basically they did too.”
Like other groundbreaking, television show–creating, memoir-writing, film comedy–making funny ladies—Rivers, Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey—Schumer seems to be possessed of a superhuman work ethic. Over the course of the weekend, I will see her get into hair and makeup and perform every night; work on the rewrite of a screenplay with her sister for a mother-daughter action comedy starring Schumer and Goldie Hawn that is a month away from shooting in Hawaii; gather people in a hotel room in Minneapolis to watch the premiere of Inside Amy Schumer; gather people in a private room in Omaha for the premiere of her best friend Rachel Feinstein’s stand-up special, which Schumer produced; fine-tune her manuscript with her book agent and editor. And that’s just the work I was around to witness.
“I wouldn’t know what motivates Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus,” says Schumer when I bring this up. “This insatiable drive. I have it too. Sometimes I feel like they’re hustling, they want something, and they’re not going to stop until they get it, and they play the game. I am very into making up my own rules. Like, I don’t want to play the game and succeed at it. I want to redefine it. That’s the only way I can deal with it. Maybe that’s naive. ”
Or maybe not. One of the reasons her TV show feels so fresh is that she hired writers with little experience in television. “I think that partly explains our success,” she says, “because they aren’t seasoned old vets who have seen every joke in the world. It was new to all of us.” Much like South Park, Schumer fearlessly tackles taboo subjects like incest and bodily excretions, except she’s a person, not a cartoon. She also shows zero reverence for the Hollywood playbook and hates Los Angeles. “Living in New York, I don’t have to deal with that whole industry part of it. There’s no networking. I don’t pretend to be nice.” She stares at me for a second, and you can see a punch line coming. “An agent called me the other day, probably to poach me, and he was like, ‘Hi!’ And I was like, ‘Why are you calling me?’ He made up some bullsh*t. ‘I was just looking for an excuse to call you!’ And I was like, ‘Well, it sounds like you didn’t find one.’ ”
I will come to learn that Amy Schumer cannot abide pointless, unproductive chitchat, which is why she can sometimes be direct to the point of near-rudeness. “I can’t hide my feelings,” she tells me. “I’m efficient. I’ve always been that way.” This would seem to be a corollary to her weariness with people fussing over her with redundant kindnesses because she is now so famous; e.g., the person who delivered coffee to her room coming back five minutes later with more creamer even though we didn’t ask for more. (“So annoying,” she says. “There isn’t enough cream? There’s two pitchers of it. We’re not making a milk shake.”)
It is as unself-consciously real an approach as one might expect from someone who has arrived at such a vertiginous place in our culture, a celebrity whose every move is being documented and judged. It’s probably why her comedy has connected with so many on such a deep level: Being blunt does not necessarily equate with being mean. To Schumer’s mind, it is the phoniness of snobby politeness that is the true b*tch. “I think the reign of the mean girls is ending,” she says. “I think people are gravitating toward a more honest, more normal human.” Likability has become something of a dirty word for modern-day feminists, as if a woman’s daily routine should include being eternally vigilant about whether she presents as pleasant and appealing. Amy Schumer is not the least bit concerned with being likable, which, oddly enough, has made millions love her—although she does have more than her fair share of haters and trolls, she says, mostly men who “don’t like my disgusting feminism. The feedback that reaches me is so equal in appreciation and outrage that it doesn’t feel overwhelming in either direction.” Does it ever get to you? “Some days it does. Some days there will be a bunch of Web sites dedicated to trying to get me to just shut my mouth, or I’ll walk into a greenroom and someone had a caricature artist draw me and it’s with a martini glass, looking like a linebacker with Jay Leno’s chin. That can get to me. I’m not without that vulnerability.”
We land in Minneapolis around 1:30 p.m., just as the news is breaking that Prince has died, and suddenly everyone is staring into their phones, murmuring in a state of stunned disbelief as we pile into several waiting SUVs. I get into a car with Kim and Amy that is being driven by an amiable man named Izzy, who looks like he could be part of Prince’s entourage: conked hair, a gold ring on every finger, huge black sunglasses. As we roll along toward the hotel, Schumer is processing the news. “My manager is probably lying on the floor crying. He loved Prince more than his own children.” And you? “I was always a little confused about him. I was always like, I don’t understand why or what.” It makes perfect sense that she would be immune to the Prince mystique; he was an unironic master of artifice and obfuscation—her polar opposite. The car goes quiet for a moment. “Izzy, were you a Prince fan?”
“I don’t know if I’d say fan,” he says. “I admired his music. I used to work for him, and I guess I shied away from him for about three or four years. Very unpredictable.”
“I hear that,” says Schumer. “I like people who are predictable.”
Just then Kim and Amy become distracted by something on Amy’s phone. “This is the best picture I’ve ever seen,” says Kim. They are looking at a photograph of their 66-year-old father, Gordon, who was diagnosed with MS when he was 39 and has been in an assisted-care facility for seven years. The alcoholic, fight-picking father character played by Colin Quinn in Trainwreck isn’t just loosely based on their dad: It is their dad. (“It’s all true, except my dad isn’t a racist,” says Schumer.) “He’s moving to, like, a fancy facility today,” Amy says. Bizarrely enough, a woman with MS saw Trainwreck and connected the family with a doctor who does stem-cell research. “So this is my assistant, with our dad, moving.” Schumer stares at the picture of her father in a wheelchair in the back of a van. “How is it that Prince is dead and Dad is still alive?”
That night, we head to the Target Center, where Schumer will be performing. Across the street, there are hundreds of mourning Prince fans in front of First Avenue, the club where Purple Rain was filmed. (The crowd will grow to thousands, requiring us to have a police escort back to the hotel.) We all hang out in Schumer’s dressing room: her brother and sister; Mike Berkowitz, one of her agents; and Isaac Witty, a comedian she has known for a dozen years, who is opening for her tonight. Schumer has decided to acknowledge Prince’s death with one simple gesture: pouring a little bit of wine out onstage at the top of her set. “I’m not going to do, like, the too-soon Prince joke,” she says.
Schumer is pacing around, grazing on sliced turkey and crackers, while she and Witty reminisce. Listening to them I am reminded of the fact that when comedians get together they can be brutal, as if life were a moving roast. To the unitiated, it may seem cruel, but it’s really the perverse way comics express their affection for one another. They wind up talking about a mutual comedian friend named Joe, whom Schumer calls “the shoulderless worm.” “Nikki dated him for a while, and she described having sex with him as like having a piece of grilled chicken flop around on top of you.” Witty is in stitches. “Those were not her words,” says Schumer, “but that’s what I was left with.” When the laughing stops, Schumer says to no one in particular, “Love that guy, though.”
Her hair and makeup are done, but she is only partially dressed for the show, still wearing Isabel Marant “snow boots.” “There’s a wedge, so it’s not like I’m not wearing heels,” she says. And the dress? “Someone packs me. I would not know how to do this. But it’s usually a dress.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m hearing myself talk and I’m like: Who cares? I’m just imagining you guys listening to it.” And then in a bored deadpan: “Sometimes I wear pants.”
Like politicians, comedians are notoriously unstylish, mostly because caring about fashion is a give-away for taking oneself too seriously, which is totally not funny. Indeed, some of Schumer’s new material is about making fun of how she dresses. She flashes paparazzi pictures on the giant screens of herself and Kim on New York streets. “It looks like we’re women who were told, ‘You can’t stay at the shelter anymore.’ But they write about us as if we’re glamorous celebrities, like, ‘Schumer today opted for performance fleece.’ And my favorite ever was ‘Schumer, wearing a Forever 21 pleather jacket.’ ”
but she looks great. i just wish the dress was a bit longer
