SAN FRANCISCO—“I’m just going to say my real thoughts tonight, even though this town loves to protest,” comedian Amy Schumer said early in her headlining set outside on the Civic Center Plaza Saturday night.
Over the course of her 35-minute performance as part of Comedy Central’s second annual Clusterfest, Schumer talked about getting trolled online about her body and facing real-life protests from vegan activists who called her a “murderer” for wearing a coat with a coyote fur hood.
“I was like, oh my God, that doctor said he would never tell anyone,” Schumer joked. “That’s just a fun abortion joke while we still have a choice. Let’s enjoy it before we’re all wearing bonnets. Such a cool time to be a woman.”
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Later in the set, Schumer got a loud cheer from the crowd when she said that she thinks we need to start raising men to be “nicer” from a young age. This eventually led Schumer to a new bit about the #MeToo movement.
“You know one in six women are raped, right?” she asked the audience. “A lot of women here have been sexually assaulted. And I’m only bringing it up because I’m so proud of the women who came forward and I’m so grateful to them.”
“I personally—and I haven’t said this yet—I met with Harvey Weinstein three times,” Schumer continued, making her way to joke, “and he never even fucking looked at me. Like, nothing!” She went on to say that she was alone with Charlie Rose in his green room and he “didn’t even wink at me.”
“This is true,” she added. “I tried to get backstage at a Bill Cosby show 10 years ago.” She recalled knocking on his dressing room door in Las Vegas to no avail. “I’m like, ‘One drink?’ He’s like, “No.”
“I’m so proud of these women, it’s so awful, but why not #MeToo?” Schumer asked, self-deprecatingly. “What does a bitch have to do?”
Schumer’s new material follows a far more serious conversation she has been having about sexual assault. During an interview with Katie Couric back in February, Schumer said of her first sexual experience, “I was flat-out raped.”
In a subsequent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Schumer elaborated. “I personally feel like I lost my virginity through rape,” she said. “I didn’t consent. We hadn’t discussed it. We weren’t there in our relationship. We weren’t at that moment.”
A few minutes after the jokes about Weinstein, Rose, and Cosby, Schumer was worrying aloud that her elderly, wheelchair-bound father might “#MeToo” someone himself. She said she wished prostitution was legal so she could hire someone to give him a hand job.
“I’m sure people are writing about this show,” she realized at that point, predicting the headline: “Schumer Needs Someone to Jerk Her Dad Off.” But, she predicted, “That’s going to backfire, because it’ll happen for him and I can’t wait.”
