There are no official statistics available on the matter, so you’ll forgive the unscientific nature of this statement, but I’d hazard a guess that the phrase “cum-dumpster” has never echoed around the venerable Hamer Hall as frequently as it did on Wednesday night.
Then again, I don’t think Hamer Hall’s usual inhabitants play Wu-Tang Clan and NWA as house music. But as Amy Schumer said during her one-night-only sell-out gig: “Melbourne Symphony are playing here next week. And if you liked this…”
She didn’t need to finish the joke, and she often doesn’t. Schumer, probably one of the top standups working today, has a habit of subverting the punchline with a horrified glance, full-body dry heave, or some incoherency muttered in the crone-like whine of a Long Island princess. It’s these physical non-sequiturs, more clowning than commentary, that are the icing on top of a bracingly filthy cake.
Not that she led the evening with her “sex comic” material; instead, she ricocheted out the other side of 48 hours’ worth of press for her feature debut, Trainwreck, and took the crowd on a slightly jetlagged tour of her life as it stands. To wit: she’s really, really famous all of a sudden, you guys.
Many comedians who hit the big, big time are undone by material that asks the audience to sympathise with how horrible it was when first class ran out of steak. But as schticky as Schumer’s “I’m just trash” routine occasionally feels, the audience can still go with it because there’s still enough genuine bamboozlement on her part that she – a fairly normal (if whip smart and astoundingly funny) girl from Long Island – has made it big.
Every story of Hollywood excess is delivered with a big helping of “Can you believe it?!”, but it’s clear she’s clued in enough on the hollowness of fame that she can still muse, “You know when you’re younger, and you have hope?”
This collision of old life and new is ripe material and she excoriates it with a satirist’s venom: her unspoken battle of empowerment and self-acceptance with Mindy Kaling as they both attack the bread basket at a fancy dinner; her gauche response to winning an award at an event populated by actual heroes.
Her success also gives added potency to anecdotes from her days as a jobbing comic on the audition circuit, leavening her battleworn tales of being asked if she was “here to read for the girl who’s getting gastric bypass surgery?” with the quiet satisfaction of a former outcast at her 15-year high school reunion.
Clearly still smarting from recent discussion of her material, Schumer betrayed a little residual bruising when she sighed, “That’ll be the headline of tomorrow’s angry blog” after one less-than-savoury bit, and a remark about Melbourne’s lack of “black people” received a ripple of groans amongst scattered laughter. This “edgy” material felt tired, and not just because Schumer was clearly feeling the effects of a jam-packed schedule.
Where Schumer really shines is at either end of her own spectrum: in her easy, breezy observations (such as one story about a pair of dim young men discussing chips on the New York subway, delivered with such sincerity it was heartwarming), or her sledgehammer-direct explorations of sexuality (an ode to every woman who has ever “taken a load”, and a throwaway bit about the symbolism of ordering a cranberry juice).
Whatever falls in between, and it’s typically the type of material that leads to “angry blogs”, tends to fall by the wayside. Given this high-flying new world Schumer finds herself inhabiting, it’s surprising she hasn’t jettisoned it as excess baggage – not because she’s famous now, and it follows that she should do safer stuff; au contraire, it’s because we know she can go harder and sharper, and that’s B-team material for her at best.
And her A-game is so strong, she can make a discussion of an unmentionable sex act ring out in Hamer Hall as though it were the most exhilarating aria ever written.
