Ever since Dave Chappelle got attacked on stage during a performance last year, people have apparently been asking Amy Schumer whether it’s a “dangerous” time for comedians.
“When they ask I’m like, ‘Yes, I’m on the front lines every night,’” the comedian jokes in her new Netflix stand-up special, Amy Schumer: Emergency Contact. But in reality? “Like, no,” Schumer says. “Not if you’re me... Maybe if you’re them, and you have this spry—my people are like me. We’re tired. Nobody’s tackling anybody. We’re all too tired.”
Emergency Contact is a mixed bag. One minute, Schumer is invoking (and, honestly, kind of whiffing on) Chappelle, and moments later, she’ll deliver a scathing punchline about our health-care system’s utter lack of interest in conditions that affect only women. (“... But if your husband wants, we have chewable Viagra!) As she did in her 2020 Netflix documentary Expecting Amy, Schumer also discusses some of the complications she experienced during pregnancy.
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Schumer’s brash charisma shines through each knowing grin and comical pout, like the one she puts on as she mimics a man who doesn’t wanna swallow a pill. Similarly to John Mulaney, who opened his most recent Netflix special by picking out a young audience member and speaking directly to them for comedic effect sporadically throughout the night, Schumer selects a 27-year-old named Libby, whom she’ll occasionally tease with the horrors of aging.
At the same time, some of Schumer’s material can feel dated, either spiritually or as a cultural reference. For instance: Viewers arrive at the Chappelle discussion through a story about Schumer’s visit to the home of a “secret” blind millionaire—meaning, he is blind but as someone supposedly explained to Schumer, “everyone around him acts like it’s not happening.”
“I’m like, you can be that rich, that you’re just not blind?”
Schumer describes finding her host in the kitchen cooking, where he offered to serve them drinks but accidentally poured it onto the floor. “All night, shit like this is happening,” Schumer says. “People just clean it up... Dinner took nine years to cook.”
Throughout the night, Schumer says, she found herself bringing up vision by accident: “Is anyone watching The Watcher?” “How long have you been seeing her?” (“Fuck,” Schumer recalled correcting in the latter instance. “Smelling her.”)
“I don't think it's cool to make fun of blind people,” Schumer says. “I just don’t think that you can be a secret blind. And if there’s gonna be one group of people that’s really mad at me, that feels like a safe one.”
By the end, Schumer acknowledges that she’s been “baiting” her audience. She does it again when she discusses Hilaria Baldwin, saying that the faux Spaniard and her husband Alec named their children “all very Spanish names, like Jamón and Croqueta and Flamenco.”
Once again, however, Schumer is just hoping someone might raise their eyebrows. When she reveals to her audience the not-so-new news that “Hilaria from Ethpaña” is not from Spain, the comedian asks, “Did you think I was just doing a really racist Spanish impression?”
The bit feels a bit out of place; the pop-culture fact that inspires it has been known for years, and Schumer’s retelling is not particularly insightful or memorable. But it does provide an excellent punchline to a bit Schumer had set up earlier: Marriage is all about finding “someone who can fucking stand you.”
Unsurprisingly, the best material in Emergency Contact is all personal—like when Schumer jokingly compares herself to Libby, perhaps as an analog for her younger self. When she jokes about her newly discovered hump, or her husband’s inability to deliver compliments, or accidentally naming her child “Gene Attell Fisher,” aka “genital fissure,” she’s undeniable. In each of those moments, it’s hard to fathom why she’d waste precious time on anything else.
