“Why are you late, sluts?” half-barks, half-beams Amy Schumer as a couple of tiddly twentysomethings excuse their way through the fourth row. In its mix of New York chutzpah and redemptive bonding – she forgives them with a zesty snapped comeback about birthdays – it sets the scene rather nicely for an hour and more of raucous, chiefly unprintable, musings on accidental fame and unplanned tequila blackouts; of raucous and chiefly unprintable distilled Amy.
The second leg of Schumer’s European tour after the worldwide success of Trainwreck and the $8m book advance, this arrived in Edinburgh the night after the festival ended and all the Americans went home. The clever ones (and there are few others who come here) must be kicking themselves at missing not only their current poster girl for feminism but one of the finest, if filthiest, standups on the planet: her act was honed on stage and she’s still comfiest and most human here.
The act ranges, with only mildly varying degrees of audience love, between established routines about men and sex in which Schumer nevertheless always seems to find something fresh to say – outrageously fresh, I’d thought, until I gazed around me at arrays of demure young women weeping, jaws wide with a rictus of recognition – and the contemporary. Her success is, she would have us believe, a sticky problem to her: hanging with Hillary, flirting with Bradley Cooper, when all she wants to do is eat and remain the third best-looking chick in any bar. As for the accidental fame, live with it, dear Amy; you’re only 35 once and have so much more to give.
She was sharpest, unbearably sharp, after an unconscionable incident last August, when it came to gun control. Her contempt knew few bounds. She was similar, if more forgiving, when musing on the Kardashian mindset – “The faces you were born with were just a light suggestion, hon. That’s just the nose stupid God gave you.” There were wonderful riffs on being VIP’d through the Anne Frank rope, and the insanities of papped shots of the Schumer clan, and later Amy told us about her weight in most graphic fashion, by inviting us to guess when her thighs, as she splayed them cheerfully from within her black minidress, were no longer touching. I’m convinced half the men in the audience fell in love with her then and there. But who wouldn’t, with a sexy blond who’s sharp enough not to care?
Jo Rowling, who was there, loved it. After one extended – plug is not the word here – extemporisation on anal sex, specifically the bizarre male predilection for same, Schumer turned to carefully catch the Playhouse’s spotlight silhouetting her in a halo. She’s not the Messiah, just a very naughty girl. Here’s to very naughty, very clever girls.
