No Need to Apologise, Alas

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo
by Amy Schumer
HarperCollins, 2016, 336 pages, $29.99

A few years ago, Amy Schumer was a successful comedian. More recently, she has become some sort of feminist messiah. Her tweets, interviews and public sightings send the pop-culture press into a frenzy of adoration. Last year, while her popularity was exploding, she managed to renegotiate the advance on her autobiography from $1 million to a record breaking $8 million.

Sadly, the most interesting, controversial moment in Amy Schumer’s career isn’t covered at all in The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. Last year, shortly before the much anticipated release of her debut feature film Trainwreck, the Guardian published an op-ed accusing Schumer of racial insensitivity. She, apparently, had “a shockingly large blind spot around race”, habitually telling jokes like: “Nothing works 100 per cent of the time, except Mexicans”, which delved “into racial territory tactlessly and with no apparent larger point”. Via Twitter, Schumer was quick to defend her work:

Stick with me and trust me that I’m joking. I go in and out of playing an irreverent idiot. That includes making dumb jokes involving race. You can call it a “blind spot for racism” or “lazy” but you are wrong. It is a joke and it is funny … I am not going to start joking about safe material.

The Guardian piece was, of course, a hatchet job. Jokes were taken out of context and deliberately presented in an unfavourable light. The joke cited above is actually just a fragment in a longer routine. I am loath to explain the point of the original joke, since nothing is quite so dull as the dissection of humour, but here goes: after saying “except Mexicans”, Schumer pauses, and waits for the audience’s uncomfortable response. In the video you can hear, if not booing, then at least an “ooh-ing” noise. “That’s the one, right?” she says, acknowledging that a line has been crossed. “‘Boo, Mexicans!’, I hear you! You guys are preaching to the choir.” This second part of the joke is delivered satirically—in a mocking southern accent. She is acting as though the audience is offended, not at the invocation of a racial stereotype, but at the very mention of Mexicans. The first part of the joke, the part quoted in the hit piece, is merely a gambit. It is supposed to sound as though it was lifted from a bad 1950s joke book. It is merely the prelude to the second part of the joke, in which a direct correlation is drawn between stupidity and racism. Amy Schumer is, in her own words, “playing an irreverent idiot”.

By standing up for herself she didn’t win over her detractors, she infuriated them. The Washington Post wasted no time comparing her to Donald Trump, saying that both “draw on cultural stereotypes”, and use “dehumanising language that gives life to an ecosystem of racial fear and violence”. This was not a battle Schumer was well equipped to fight. Her meteoric rise was thanks, in no small part, to the glowing support she had received from the very same progressive periodicals that were now going for her jugular. “The response is disheartening for those who’ve been cheering Schumer’s ascendance,” wrote E. Alex Jung for Slate, rather threateningly. The twitterati giveth, and the twitterati taketh away.

A few days later, Schumer posted a very different explanation online. “I am evolving as any artist,” she wrote, “I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize it [sic] I did.” Apologising for a joke is about as close as a comedian can come to selling their soul. After her apology, the likes of the Guardian, the Washington Post and Salon went back to being her personal Pravda.

In many ways, her film Trainwreck was one, but the critics couldn’t find enough nice things to say. “This is a film that belongs not to its director but to its star, who, if there is any justice in the world, is about to ascend from cult icon to mass phenomenon,” wrote the Atlantic. “The title of the movie suggests its heroine is in need of repair,” wrote Buzzfeed, adding that, somehow, the movie managed to “defy condemnation”. No kidding. Movie reviewing aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 85 per cent rate of approval from critics, but only 67 per cent from the public. In a star-driven, blockbusting, pleb-pleasing comedy these numbers are usually reversed. Anchorman, for instance, scores 66 per cent and 86 per cent respectively, and Happy Gilmore, 60 per cent and 85 per cent.

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is a mess. Overtly “not a memoir”, it is instead a hodge­podge of anecdotes, essays and old diary entries, presented in no cohesive order. It is not so much a book as a series of long, confessional tweets. The writing itself is burdensome, with tiresome asides like “Anywhoozle” scattered all over. If a ghostwriter was involved, they weren’t very good. On stage, Schumer overflows with charisma. Her impeccable comic timing, however, in no way translates to print. If using an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke, heaven knows what the equivalent is of repeatedly following up punchlines with “JKJKJKJK!”

Comedians do not tend to make good prose stylists; those who can say so much with a wink or a nod can seldom say nearly as much with actual words. In stand-up or a sketch, Schumer is capable of raising vulgarity to high art. Her gross-out humour, combined with truly outstanding delivery, is liberating. When written down, the non-stop references to defecation and genitalia quickly become tiresome and boorish.

Worse are the chapters devoted to consolidating her cult of personality. “On Being New Money” is a very laboured attempt to reconcile her newfound wealth with how generous and down-to-earth she avowedly is. “Beautiful and Strong” is about how, you guessed it, she feels “beautiful and strong”: “I embrace my power. I say if I’m beautiful. I say if I’m strong. You will not determine my story. I’ll speak and share and f—k and love, and I will never apologise for it.” I read that section aloud to my girlfriend to see if there was something innately female required to appreciate it. She asked that I not further expose her to “any more of that cancerous garbage”—so no luck there. You might grant a celebrity some gushing sentimentality at the end of their memoir, but this sort of thing is on every second page. It’s exhausting.

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo is mostly disappointing, but when Schumer tells the tales of her life’s traumas—her mother breaking up two marriages, her father developing multiple sclerosis, her survival of sexual assault and domestic abuse—she writes with great pathos. Also, she has throughout avoided telling cheap, gossipy stories about other celebrities—of which she must have hundreds—which shows more self-restraint than most newly mega-famous memoirists could muster. Still, at no point does any of it approach literature. One is left with the impression that this was a book written solely because Schumer is at the point in her career when it is appropriate to release a book. She is an ascendant star, with popularity powered by the renewed and enthusiastic support of the social justice industrial complex. Financially, if not artistically, that $8 million was probably a good call.

The wonderfully funny irreverence that propelled Schumer to fame in the first place is absent from her book. You couldn’t accuse her of only joking about “safe” material, but neither has she written a single sentence here she’ll ever be pushed to apologise for.

James McCann is an Australian writer and comedian. He may be found online at jamesdonaldforbesmccann.com