There’s
a moment in season 2 of Silicon
Valley
when the male nerds behind the fictional startup Pied Piper hire a
female engineer named Carla, bringing the number of women working at
the company up to a whopping two. The inept CFO Jared awkwardly
pushes company advisor Monica and Carla to hang out, exclaiming, “I
knew you two would hit it off!” as soon as they exchange tepid
hellos.
Comparing Chelsea Peretti and Amy Schumer is a bit like forcing Monica and Carla into a lunch date. Yes, they are both women, and yes, they are both hilarious. They even take Instagram pictures together sometimes!
But this is pretty much where their similarities end. I’ve been thinking about the two of them a lot lately, however, because they represent two distinct strategies for being a woman in a world that is, overtly or not, hostile to women pretty much all of the time.
The Peretti Method: Refusing to Play Ball
I was a fan of Peretti’s before I was a fan of Schumer’s, partly because Peretti’s strategies for navigating the world as a woman are more familiar and more appealing to me. Peretti objects to the narrow categories that women and men are slotted into (or slot themselves into) by refusing to ever play to a recognizable type. She is, at all times, singularly Chelsea Peretti, whether she is playing a fame-hungry singer on The Kroll Show or an emoji-speaking administrator on Brooklyn 99. This is no small feat in a culture that works relentlessly to pigeonhole women (the pretty one! the girl next door! the cool girl! the psycho!), as Peretti knows. She jokes about the work it took to become herself in her brilliant Netflix special, One of the Greats. Over clips of (fictional) shows like “Bitch, Please” (courtesy of the “HooHa Network”), where Peretti appears in a skimpy dress and delivers lines like “Ladies, who’s a whore? We all are, we just need to own it. I’m a whore! I’m ugly but I’m a whore. I’m an ugly whore, I don’t care!” and “It’s Go Time!” (courtesy of “HOBO”), where Peretti dons Eddie Murphy’s iconic red leather suit and puts on a high-energy, crowd-baiting persona, Peretti explains, “I did countless hour specials where I looked like a damn fool trying to be something I wasn’t.”
This
bit is and is not about being a female comic. All comedians struggle
to find their voice or their brand—this goes with the territory.
But women face special pressure to fit into identifiable categories
that are, more often than not, based on physical appearance. As
Peretti has argued, women are frequently treated as the “kid
sister[s] of the ‘real comedians.'” There
is a prevailing feeling that female comedians are interlopers – as
Peretti put it in an interview with San
Francisco Weekly,
there is a “small” but “looming” segment of comedy fans whose
attitude is “Why is a woman trying to be funny? … That’s what
men do. Women should be pretty, and that’s what they’re supposed to
do … There’s a base level of people who already hate you straight
out of the gate.” (Lest anyone think this is an unfounded opinion, Peretti has also
frequently mentioned an experience when she first started doing
standup when her set bombed and the emcee announced to the crowd afterwards, “She
wasn’t funny, but I’d fuck her.”)
One strategy for female comedians, Peretti suggests, is to find a way out of the recognizable types that get easy laughs (the ugly slut, the dumb pretty girl), because refusing to play to type is a way to be fully human. It’s a strategy that matters more to women than to men because women are objectified and commodified in a way that men simply are not. When Peretti appears on Jimmy Fallon’s show wearing a hoodie, or makes a public appearance while covered in a sleeping bag, she is refusing to play the part of the woman who has value because she is pretty. The message is clear: take Peretti on her own terms or get out of her way.
One of Peretti’s best and least appreciated refusals of type is her resistance to niceness, witnessed most often on her appearances on The Pete Holmes Show and on her podcast, Call Chelsea Peretti. Peretti is relentlessly mean to Holmes (in one bit she describes how she would kill him if she were ever to murder him; it involves shoveling dirt into his mouth while he laughs his distinctive laugh) and to other comedian friends like Brendon Walsh, whom she calls “my neighbor and dear, dear colleague” in the pilot episode of her podcast, to which Walsh replies, “but you’re my best friend!” But Peretti is also incapable of saying something cutting without subsequently spontaneously giggling, giving away that the meanness is a setup among friends. It’s funny because she isn’t actually a cruel person – Peretti the comedian is rude and antisocial because social conventions are strange, especially for women, and it’s fun and cathartic to explore a world where one could do away with the pleasantries that structure our lives.
In their review of the first episode of Call Chelsea Peretti, The AV Club rather bizarrely described Peretti’s persona as “exquisitely snotty” and “mean-spirited,” and called her “a distaff Don Rickles for a new generation.” In addition to its questionable use of “distaff,” the review mischaracterizes the tone of Peretti’s podcast. Peretti is far from “mean-spirited.” She forges genuine connections with callers, discovering their personal stories by asking out-of-left-field questions. She does mock and interrupt callers (and herself), but this isn’t because Peretti is a female Rickles. Peretti is not indiscriminately nice to the fans who call in to her show because she is not the type of person who is nice to everyone. (It’s also worth noting that most of the callers she actively makes fun of in that first episode are men who comment on her appearance, who call women bitches, and who engage in stalker-ish behavior.)
Refusing to play nice, like refusing to play pretty or slutty, is a way to shift the conversation from Peretti the woman to Peretti the person. In an interview with Indiewire, Peretti explained,
“early on, I had this feeling that I had to prove how tough I was, and as I’ve gotten deeper into it, I want to show more of a range. I want to show my silliness. I want to show my fears. I want to show my conversations. I think the goal, really, with stand-up is to just become this living, breathing person and this facsimile of who you are in real life, unless you have a persona, which I don’t. You’re a heightened version of yourself, but for me, I want to show as many layers as I can and use every aspect of myself that is funny.”
This is the brilliance of the Peretti Method. It creates space for a woman who is often weird and who finds humor in the awkward and the uncomfortable. In other words, it makes space for a woman to be a fully rounded person.
The Schumer Strategy: An Inside Job
Schumer’s strategy for navigating a misogynistic world is to inhabit stereotypes so fully that they explode. Witness, for instance, her take on the “starlet on a late night show” trope. Where Peretti dons protective gear, Schumer dons a dress so tight she has trouble sitting down, and giggles and pouts about the fact that she’s having a hard time sitting down. She banters and flirts vacuously, and her shiny, oiled legs glow more and more until they’re goldenly pulsating. The type is made so ridiculous that it’s completely unreal and uninhabitable.
I wasn’t sold on this tactic when I first came across it in the 2012 special Women Who Kill. Schumer (along with Rachel Feinstein, Nikki Glaser, and Marina Franklin) tells jokes about dating and sex and body image. The targets of Schumer’s jokes are often particular caricatures of women like the gold digger (“I’m not shallow. The guy I’m seeing right now isn’t even good looking. I’ve never cared about that stuff. And he’s so rich!”). I laughed, but I was also vaguely discomfited by the fact that four smart women built sets almost solely about dating, as if that’s the only thing women ever have on their minds. I kept thinking of a moment in Sex in the City when Miranda, exasperated by yet another brunch spent discussing men, blows up and berates her friends for not being able to come up with other topics of conversation. Yes, women’s experiences matter deeply, and yes, dating is something that most women think about, but is that really all we have?
There were signs of better things to come in Women Who Kill. Schumer’s best material in that special targets the insane expectations that greet women at every turn, like when she jokes about being asked to lose 30 pounds to play the fat friend in a movie, or when she describes getting advice to “just stop using” her face to avoid wrinkles. These jokes don’t reduce women’s experiences to dating and hating their physical shapes, but rather lampoon the cultural forces that encourage them to do so.
With
each season of Inside
Amy Schumer,
Schumer (along with her team of feminist writers) has made this material sharper, angrier, and funnier. I
didn’t always see this in the first two seasons. Often the joke is
about the self-destructive behavior women engage in to gain male
approval (a topic that Schumer has spoken of seriously and
eloquently). In a sketch in the very
first episode, for instance, a character named Amy parts ways with a one-night stand, and we see, via
split screen, how she and her paramour spend their days. She Googles
him, Facebook stalks him, discusses him with her girlfriends,
inquires about opening a joint checking account, tastes wedding
cakes, and shops for his-and-hers burial plots. He plays video games,
drinks, and masturbates to the image of a woman on a jar of pasta
sauce. Still standing in the cemetery, where a gravedigger is working
on the his-and-hers plots, Amy calls her future husband to make plans for the evening,
and he blows her off. She pouts, but then turns her attention to the
gravedigger. “What’s your name?” she asks. “Charles,” he
responds. “Mrs. Charles,” she says experimentally, and then smiles and adds, “keep
digging.”
It’s a joke by and for the women who can’t help but be shaped by the lowered expectations they’re pedaled on a daily basis. As all smart, successful women know, nothing you achieve ever seems to register with the world quite like the achievement of marriage. It’s impossible to escape that social pressure, whether or not one’s behavior is warped by it. As an unmarried woman watching that sketch, I laugh because the situation is so absurdly rendered, but I also despair, because the logic behind Amy’s actions is all too familiar. Similarly, in “You Would Bang Her?”, a precursor to the masterful season 3 episode “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” a focus group of men talks about the circumstances under which they would bang Amy, and explains how her show could be funnier (“if she had a 10% better dumper”). In the final scene, we see Amy behind a two-way mirror, saying, “A couple of them said they would bang me?” She turns to the camera and smiles a demented smile. Schumer is pointing the finger at the unimaginative monsters who can’t see women as anything other than sex objects, but there’s also a twist of the blade for women who can’t totally separate themselves from that value system. Of course it feels good to be wanted – even if you’re wanted for all the wrong reasons by all the wrong people. And of course it’s grotesque to be caught up in that logic.
In its third season, Schumer’s show has heightened its take on the grotesquerie of the way women are depicted in popular culture and treated in real life. Schumer has always made jokes about the pressure to be the cool girl who’s not bothered by anything, especially not sexism, but her anger at such cultural expectations is becoming more palpable. Take, for instance, a sketch in the episode “Cool With It,” which opens with Amy accompanying her male co-workers to a strip club because she’s “totally cool with it, guys!” and ends with her burying a dead stripper for the co-worker who accidentally choked her to death. After all, she’s the cool chick who can totally hang! This is darker and more pointed than other bits she’s done, hinting at the ways in which trying to be the down girl hurts the down girl herself and all the women around her (when the stripper abruptly comes back to life, Amy clobbers her with a shovel). No woman wins this game.
“Cool With It” also features the amazing “Plain Jane” sketch, in which Schumer plays a cop who is great at her job because, as a plain woman, she is invisible to everyone. She busts a diet cocaine smuggling operation because the dealers and models involved in the trade see only a bag of old leaves where Detective Amy stands. (”Did you guys hear like, a fat wind howling?” one of the models asks when Amy tells them they’re under arrest.) Amy’s chief (played by Dennis Quaid) has to finalize the bust because the perps don’t understand that they’re being arrested by what appears to them to be an inanimate object. Even the chief takes a moment to recognize Amy as a person — ”I thought that you were a jumbo sleeve of cookie dough,” he says, prodding her face. “You’re not even hotter than me, chief!” Amy cries. “We’re in the same league!” The chief responds, “Yeah, but I believe in myself.” The chief smirks, and Amy’s face hardens into an angry, despairing frown. This isn’t mocking the women who cope terribly with a looks-based value system — it’s raging at the system that treats women as objects and men as people.
“Cool With It” ends with Amy interviewing Noel Biderman, CEO of the company that owns AshleyMadison.com. Unlike other interviews on the show, in which Amy gently mocks her guests, this interview features Amy taking Biderman to task for commercials that suggest that men cheat because women get old and fat. She’s clearly disgusted, and isn’t hiding the disgust behind jokes or personae. Like the sketches in this episode, it simply calls out sexist bullshit for what it is. It challenges the viewer to look at it, full in the face, and to consider the harm it does to real women every day (after Biderman blithely suggests that it’s natural for men to cheat when their wives get pregnant, head writer Jessi Klein appears, heavily pregnant, and calls Biderman a “demon”).
Schumer’s anger is paying huge dividends. Almost every sketch in this season has gone viral, and with good reason. Her parody of Friday Night Lights (“Clear eyes. Full hearts. Don’t rape.”) was so spot on in its send up of rape culture, and so laugh-out-loud funny in its caricature of Connie Britton’s iconic role as the coach’s wife, that it launched a thousand think pieces and cemented Schumer’s reputation as one of our best contemporary comics. A sketch about trying Bill Cosby in the court of public opinion, which just started making the internet rounds, is also masterful satire that challenges viewers to weigh their desire to hang on to a nostalgic attachment to pudding pops against the real pain of real women who were drugged and raped by Cosby. It also wields this heavy message without sacrificing laughter. It’s powerful comedy, and it’s heartening to see it become so popular.
The danger in singling out particular women in any arena in which they are underrepresented is the tendency to try to make them represent of all women in that arena (Linda Holmes has written eloquently about the problem of underrepresentation here). Chelsea Peretti does not represent women in comedy. Amy Schumer does not represent women in comedy. No single woman will ever represent women in comedy. But Peretti and Schumer do stand out as examples of sharp, uncompromising women who have found ways to resist the cultural logics that would dehumanize them if they could. For that, they are indeed two of the greats.