#TIME » Review: Inside Amy Schumer Makes the Personal Parodic Comments Feed How to Watch the Lyrid Meteor Shower This Week New Genetic Test for Breast Cancer Would Be Cheaper and Easier alternate alternate TIME WordPress.com TIME Time.com MY ACCOUNT SIGN IN SIGN OUT SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE Home U.S. Politics World Business Tech Health Science Entertainment Newsfeed Living Sports History The TIME Vault Magazine Ideas Parents TIME Labs Money LIFE The Daily Cut Photography Videos TIME Shop The 100 Most Influential People The 25 Best Inventions of 2015 Future of Giving Know Right Now Next Generation Leaders Person of the Year 2015 Top 10 Everything of 2015 Top of the World A Year In Space Subscribe Newsletters Feedback Privacy Policy Your California Privacy Rights Terms of Use Ad Choices Ad Choices RSS TIME Apps TIME for Kids Advertising Reprints and Permissions Site Map Help Customer Service © 2016 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Entertainment MY ACCOUNT SIGN IN SIGN OUT SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE MORE (BUTTON) U.S. Edition * U.S. Edition * Europe, Middle East and Africa Edition * Asia Edition * South Pacific Edition Celine Dion’s Brother Dies Just Days After Her Husband David Bowie Honored With His Own Lightning Bolt-Shaped Constellation Wonder Woman Movie Will Be Set During World War I, Co-Star Says David Bowie Dressed for the Future All Content The Simpsons Inadvertently Paid Tribute to Alan Rickman and David Bowie Three Years Ago Tina Fey and Ronda Rousey to Co-Star in Do Nothing Bitches Movie Tracy Morgan Making New FX Comedy With Key & Peele Star News Anchor Apologizes for Joke About Alan Rickman’s Death Chirlane McCray: New York Values Are Foreign to Ted Cruz REVIEW: Ride Along 2 Offers More of the Same Silly Laughs TIME Entertainment Television Review: Inside Amy Schumer Makes the Personal Parodic * James Poniewozik @poniewozik April 21, 2015 SHARE Comedy Central Amber Rose and Schumer on the season premiere. Schumer's sketch show is a war comedy, and she's the battlefield. More Watch Star Wars Villain Kylo Ren Go ‘Undercover Boss’ on SNLWatch Saturday Night Live’s Touching Tribute to David BowieThe Simpsons Inadvertently Paid Tribute to Alan Rickman and David Bowie Three Years Ago I could tell you exactly how funny the season 3 premiere of Inside Amy Schumer is (Tues., April 21), but then I’d have to kill it. Explanations are deadly to comedy, not to mention giving away punchlines. And while Schumer’s already released the opening sketch–“Milk Milk Lemonade,” a parody of booty videos guest starring Amber Rose–the episode’s other highlights depend so much on surprise, twists and casting that if I told you–well, then you’d have to kill me. I will say, though, that the episode’s title is “Last F—able Day,” a play on the idea that every woman in Hollywood has an expiration date, the moment directors fear “your vagina is going to turn into a hermit crab.” (See also Tina Fey’s rule, in Bossypants, that “the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to f— her anymore.”) That kind of awareness–knowing how women are judged, rejecting it, enabling it, toying with it–is the nugget of nuclear fuel that powers Schumer’s feminist sketch machine. At its best–and the first three episodes of the season among the show’s best–Amy Schumer’s comedy is often intensely about herself. Not in the sense that it’s autobiographical or introspective: it’s about her person, her body, how the world sees it, how she sees it, who feels they have the right to it. Schumer jokes about being on the cusp between the kind of women pop culture objectifies and the kind it rejects; see the season 2 sketch where she played two opposing tennis players, one hot and girly (and fawned over by the announcers), one lumbering and athletic (and vilified by them). Finding comedy in the mirror isn’t unique to her or even to women comics–Louis CK bases plenty of comedy on his appearance–but the way Schumer does it, not with Phyllis Diller-style self-deprecation but playing in the gray zones of social judgment, is fruitfully uncomfortable. That sensibility is still there in season three, but it’s honed, assertive and blisteringly satirical, as in a birth-control ad where the boilerplate “Ask your doctor if birth control is right for you” morphs into demands that you also ask your boss, your boss’ priest, and random strangers. Inside Amy Schumer is really a war comedy; this battle is going on inside women, and it’s about who has the right to control them. Some sketches seem to revisit territory from the first two seasons, like one about a woman enthusiastically going to a strip club with her male coworkers, a sort-of reprise of last season’s “Chick Who Can Hang” sketch. But others take the same themes into an entirely new dimension, like the audacious third episode, “Twleve Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer.” In the full-episode sketch, a parody of the Henry Fonda jury movie, a dozen men (including Jeff Goldblum, Paul Giamatti and Vincent Kartheiser) are sequestered to judge Schumer physically. At first it’s like a remake of last season’s “You Would Bang Her?”–but it pushes the conceit into absurdity into a faux-melodrama about the male gaze arguing against itself. (“Am I the only one thinking with my dick here!” one furious juror demands.) It’s a satire of how women are assessed, and of how men are socialized to assess them, and of how pop culture presses a standardized, and thus boring, idea of sexiness on everyone. At the same time, it’s both a pitch-perfect satire of Sidney Lumet-style social-issues movies and an effective piece of social issues comedy. Schumer barely appears in the half-hour-long sketch. And yet her presence, her sensibility, is everywhere here. Like all of Inside Amy Schumer at its best, it’s hot because it’s funny. Tap to read full story 0 0 Read Next Your browser is out of date. Please update your browser at http://update.microsoft.com * Home * U.S. * Politics * World * Business * Tech * Health * Science * Entertainment * Newsfeed * Living * Ideas * Parents * Sports * History * The TIME Vault * Magazine * Subscribe * Give a Gift * TIME Shop * Newsletters * Customer Service * Site Map * Privacy Policy * Your California Privacy Rights * Terms of Use * Advertising * Ad Choices Ad Choices © 2016 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress.com VIP [p?c1=2&c2=6035728&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cv=2.0&cj=1]