As Comedy Central bulks up, it’s become so rich I can’t keep up. Almost all of the network’s original programming takes after The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, a funny person personally channeling his creativity into a medium-to-high concept. Since 2005, the network has gradually expanded—Stephen Colbert, Sarah Silverman, Demetri Martin, etc., two of whom notably graduated from The Daily Show—and now there’s Anthony Jeselnik’s loud talk show, Nick Kroll’s mindless reality channel-surfing, and Nathan Fielder’s budget business school. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch show is the closest to Inside Amy Schumer, although Amy isn’t remotely as interested in form. Both shows combine—you’ll never guess—stand-up and original sketches spun off from that stand-up material. And both focus centrally on demographic distinctions without their protagonists becoming ambassadors. Key and Peele are nerds as much as they are racial minorities, just as Amy Schumer’s persona is as dependent on selfish rich-girl entitlement as it is on shameless self-debasement, I mean, as it is on reacting to gender disparity.
That said, Inside Amy Schumer is loudly and proudly preaching sex-positivity and pointing out privilege. The gender-swapped Hooter’s sketch, in which Amy and some friends take a depressed guy to Nutter’s to cheer him up, is seared into my brain. The stand-up is all about sex and dating, the man-on-the-street interviews are basic cable’s answer to Real Sex, and the Amy Goes Deep segments typically focus on professions like stripping and dominatrix—uh—ing. The funniest sketches tend to stay on-point, like the underground service that helps you shoot glamorous naked not-quite-selfies. My personal favorite is probably the silent movie porno, in which two male producers cycle through It Girls as they attempt to out-slut one another to get ahead. It’s surprising how rare this stuff is on television. Say what you will about Sex And The City—I certainly never related—but all we have now are Chelsea Handler and vagina puns on a show about a muffin shop.
It seems to me that the gender focus slackened as the season wore on, but rewatching the pilot and now seeing tonight’s finale tells the opposite story. When Inside Amy Schumer premiered, it wasn’t at all clear that it would become so pointed. The “Two Girls, One Cup” sketch is only tangentially related—it’s mostly about Amy trying and failing to find some mitigating reason to debase herself for money and then doing it anyway—leaving the clingy hook-up sketch as the lone voice of gender studies, or something, and it’s basically an escalating, albeit not unrelatable, stereotype. Meanwhile, I still don’t know what was up with that Michael Showalter sketch about getting his arms eaten off by owls, although it does establish Amy’s habit of comparing her non-tragedies with the real misfortunes of others (see also: Tig Notaro’s cancer).
Similarly, I don’t know why the finale cedes so much time to Bridget Everett’s titty song, other than the obvious, but it reminds me of, say, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s athletic “Make ‘Em Laugh” rendition on Saturday Night Live, more interested in applause than laughs. And while I’m complaining, I’m not sure anyone needed two big jokes about the real victims of homophobia, the straight girls who fall for gay guys.