A 17-year-old kid attended some shindig and managed to grab a selfie with comedian Amy Schumer. This kid, being one of those young people always doing shit on their phone, reflexively posted the picture to his Twitter account, because he is a normal 17-year-old. In the longstanding tradition of accompanying pictures with captions, the young man went for something apropos: “Spent the night with @amyschumer. Certainly not the first guy to write that.” His friends surely responded with whatever it is teens now say to express affirmation. If you’re not familiar with Schumer’s routines, this kind of sounds like a dick thing to say–and in a vacuum, it is a rude comment. Sexual license and her own promiscuity are something she covers in her work frequently. YouTube should be replete with examples if you want to punch her name in. In that context, the comment makes complete sense. He was taking a subject strongly affiliated with her creative output and formed his own joke, trying to show his appreciation and understanding of her craft. I realise this all sounds a little pompous to explain, but apparently there is confusion over all this.
Schumer apparently found the quote–God knows how/why–and responded to it. “I get it. Cause I’m a whore? Glad I took a photo with you. Hi to your dad.” Martin Scorsese had the prescience to dramatize the exchange back in 1990, casting Joe Pesci as Amy Schumer (except for the joviality at the end; that was creative license). The kid apologized. And debased himself publicly, because he was afraid an apology was insufficient: “I truly apologize for the tweet I posted earlier. I’m not a comedian and it wasn’t funny.” Schumer was satisfied with his passing under the yoke: “that’s really okay honey. I just remember thinking you and your dad were sweet and it was a bummer to read that”.
Time explains how this is a teachable lesson. Apparently for fathers and sons. I’ll bite. Oh, I see, there’s no actual advice for fathers or sons, or really anything approaching it. That’s weird. Headlines these days…. They explain the background of the situation. “But we should all understand why Schumer responded as she did, and why so many people supported her.” Ah, I’ve actually read something on this before. I found it interesting.
“As a star who speaks openly about her sex life, Schumer is bombarded daily by society’s double standard. A man who is openly sexual and has lots of sex with different partners is considered a playboy, an idol, a guy just doing what many guys do or want to do. A woman who does the same is criticized as troubled, lacking self-worth, or ‘slutty.'” The author backs it up with an apples to oranges example about how “people” are apparently still “outraged” about Miley Cyrus being exhibitionistic while “nobody” is outraged at that one Jonas brother who apparently did a sexy photo shoot or something. Nothing backs up a facile platitude that doesn’t corroborate my life experience like a really phoned-in example….
“As a star who speaks openly about her sex life, Schumer” This was a great start, and the article should have developed after this. But it didn’t. It went off on a tangent that was apparently the main idea all along. This isn’t about Schumer, this is about society… and like, sexism and stuff. Which is fine, because Schumer is surely not unique in society in many ways, but we never learned anything about her. I was promised I’d be informed as to why she “responded as she did”!
I don’t know Schumer beyond some of her comedy. I’ve seen a couple routines. Not enough to judge her motivations (not enough for me and my aptitude, at least). There are two assessments of her comment that would make sense to me. The one is that this is sheer narcissism on Schumer’s part: only she’s allowed to make those kinds of comments. She gets to joke about promiscuity, but you don’t. Here’s a female internet personality making essentially that argument (that way it isn’t me just being sexist, or something).
Here’s a Canadian also making the point coherently. Canadians are minorities, right? So his opinion matters?
The other would be that this is just coming out of immense insecurity on her part. She took the comment way harder than it was meant to be taken. I’m arguing that as an objective fact. People apparently disagree with that, but they’re wrong; she did. The argument can still be made that the comment shouldn’t have been made, but nonetheless Schumer reacted disproportionately to the gravitas of the comment. Insecure people do this; hurt people do this.
Imagine a dog instead. The kid put out his hand so that she could sniff it and the bitch bit him hard. Is the dog aggressive or formerly abused? No, I’m not saying Schumer was abused, necessarily. But super insecure wouldn’t surprise me. Apparently a lot of comedians are super insecure. Allow this insecure comedian to explain.
I’ve seen it in my own experiences too. A stand-up comedian I knew said he got into comedy as a self-defense mechanism. He started by taking improv classes in middle school. He got teased relentlessly (also a chubby guy, in line with folks like Ralphie May, Gabriel Iglesias, and Chris Farley) and wanted to take the wind out of the sails of his verbal attackers. Yo’ mama jokes don’t sting as much when you can throw 40 back at the guy who throws 3 at you. It wouldn’t surprise me if Schumer’s in a similar boat. Although maybe women get into comedy for different reasons than men. I wonder if that’s a point of contention (Schumer was raised Jewish, according to Wikipedia, should anyone want to take up the late Hitchens up on his argument).
The kid made a comment along the lines of one that Schumer has made a career off of making herself. At the time of this writing, her tour is called “Inside Amy Schumer’s back door”. “I’m a little sluttier than the average bear” was a line from her show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer that was used for a bumper for quite some time. Her being a slut is all something that the public familiar with her work knows about her because she told us she is, repeatedly. The mistake was thinking that she has been owning that label. But she hasn’t. And this poor kid was the one who had to find out. Maybe Schumer flashed back to the mean girls or asshole guys at school being nasty to her, maybe her ego just felt slighted. Either way, a slap on the back was met with a carpet bombing.
And that’s not all Schumer’s fault. She personally was just being kind of a bitch about it. If she were 18 and they went to school together, it would just be uncomfortable gossip for a while. But she’s not. She’s an adult. And more specifically, she’s a celebrity with a lot of media pull. Celebrities have a fairly weird power: they can attract the media, but not wield it with any precision. Some of them can wield it better than others, but for the most part, the media has a mind of its own. At most they will occasionally work in tandem. Schumer’s otherwise insignificant personal spat turned into a public spectacle. And she didn’t orchestrate that, so she shouldn’t be judged as if she did. Having the media circulate around you has to be a very weird situation. It must be a huge onus on her part, but alas, it is her cross to bear. Her grievance got this kid sucked up in the media cesspool.
Whether this kid apologized on his own or his parents put him up to it, the obligation of the parents (I’ll grant the Time article that this is the father’s obligation, but that doesn’t mean a mother would be exempted from the duty) is to make the kid apologize and pull the Tweet. “But dad, I was just making a joke like she would! I didn’t mean to-” “Doesn’t matter. Take it down and apologize to her.” He upset her with a direct comment about her, which upset her, and he should apologize. He wasn’t making a critical analysis of a public figure, it was personal. Whether he’s in the wrong or not, the adult thing to do is to apologize anyway and move on. If they were friends, maybe they could sort it out. But they aren’t. So there’s no discussion. That’s how it goes. It’s one of those pain-in-the-ass life lessons that parents are supposed to get on your case about. Honestly, the parents could have told him to tone down the apology. He didn’t need to say that “isn’t a comedian” (read “I’m a lowly worm”). This isn’t the goddamn Middle Ages; in America, we don’t deign inter-class social deference. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me” would have sufficed.
On the other hand, Schumer’s dad should be making Amy apologize too. “I’m sorry I dragged you into a media shitshow”. Did she intentionally do that? Probably not. The media is its own disgusting monster, and they are responsible for their own actions. But she was still the catalyst. But that would require her looking at this through the kid’s eyes: he wasn’t being a bully or taking a shot at her with malice.
The kid apologized, so his part is done. Schumer isn’t going to apologize, and obviously that’d be silly to expect. So what’s the teachable moment we’re left with? Don’t meet your heroes? Be careful what you post on social media? There’s some stuff to look at here. I think it mostly boils down to, “yeah, sometimes stuff comes out of left field just kind of deal with that the best you can. There’s no real way around it. That’s how life works a lot.” But we don’t get that. We get tripe. “Sexism is bad!” Yes. Got it. Good show. It’s a facile argument masquerading as social commentary. It’s another in the line of saying anything, no matter how insipid, is good and laudable if it’s under the aegis of Being a Good Person. This subset of Being a Good Person is defending women.
At least that’s the bait. The plight of middle/upper-class women dealing with mundane first-world-problems is all the rage right now, and it’s a great hook to draw viewers. Once they’re seated and have their eyeballs ready, it’s not too hard to redirect them. The story about Schumer was really just a pretext to talk about how there is a “double standard” and that affects women negatively. Through some pretty tortured logic and deft maneuvering on the author’s part, we get to: “My kids are too young for this specific talk, but I’m already very conscious of teaching them to avoid double standards, which also hurt men. It’s where my battle for paid family leave and reasonable policies comes from. It’s what All In is all about.” What does this have to do with a teenager who made a joke that made sense contextually that got blown up by a media pandering to the woe-is-women consumer demographic? Nothing. See that link? Click it. Take a look at the author name. Go back to the main article.
This whole thing was an ad for a book. The editorial content was incidental. Advertising is an arms race. Fast-forwarding with a DVR and AdBlock aren’t prepared for this one.