Amy Schumer, Playhouse Edinburgh, review: 'does plucky but downtrodden humanity like few comedians of such fame could hope to match'

The Emmy-winning comedian and actress is at once fiercely self-deprecating and unafraid to revel in her fame

Amy Schumer performing at the Apollo (HBO/YouTube)

She’s such a bad stand-up, murmurs Amy Schumer at more than one point during this first UK date of her latest tour, and as if to accentuate the point she’ll rub her head and digress and tell us to remind her of points she wants to come back to later (her “holocaust story” is one we may or may not want to look forward to). The presence of written notes on a stool next to her suggests this waywardly conversational approach isn’t an act, but it really doesn’t matter; Schumer does plucky but gloriously downtrodden humanity like few comedians of such fame can hope to match.

One of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015, a multiple Emmy Award winner and recipient of a Peabody Award for her series Inside Amy Schumer, and Golden Globe-nominated for Trainwreck, her 2015 film with Judd Apatow, Schumer is the link between the gutter and the stars.

The New Yorker is at once fiercely self-deprecating about her fame yet unafraid to revel in it, making "aw shucks, you shouldn’t have" noises at the audience while cupping her hand to her ear and turning her mic on them to soak up the applause at mention of one triumph or another.

She’s warmly confessional, affecting (most likely affecting, at least) an easy détente with her need for male attention and with her booze blackouts. What do you do when you wake up from one to find a man is giving you oral sex, she asks in one of the more potentially awkward exchanges. What does she even know about this guy? “Well… he’s a hero,” she decides, before listing in gynaecological detail the reasons why he shouldn’t be doing that.

Yet the sense that she takes no nonsense also comes through strong, not least when she gets into a heated discussion with one audience member about why she chooses to use birth control. “Yeah, it makes you fat,” she snaps back at their point. “Fat with not having a baby!”

This is a woman who, she tells us, tried to get out of a dinner party hosted by Hillary Clinton so she could drink wine and eat pizza, until she discovered she would be sitting next to the then-Secretary of State; and then proceeded to badger Clinton about what she likes to drink.

To describe her show as fiercely feminist only tells part of the story, underselling the wonderful humanity, teeth-gritting (and often anatomical) honesty, and sheer, unique force of personality which crosses audience boundaries. She rails against the body image messages sent out by the Kardashians; by describing her in the press as ‘brave’ for wearing a bikini; by fashion writers evaluating she and her sister’s slouchy old clothes (sister Kim is wearing a Gryffindor hat in the pictures; JK Rowling is in the audience here).

Yet she also covers her embarrassment at American politics and her anger at US gun laws, particularly following a fatal shooting at a screening of Trainwreck, with devastatingly relatable precision.

Amy Schumer is at the O2 Apollo, Manchester, 3 September; O2 Arena, London, 4 September; amyschumer.com