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Two words made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen on TV did this year: “Fart Park.”
I’m cracking up again just from typing them. Fart Park!
On Inside Amy Schumer, which launched its fifth season Thursday on Paramount+, Schumer plays a character who stumbles upon Fart Park. It’s a gated section of Washington Square Park, “part of a city-wide initiative, judgment-free zones where people can go fart outside.” We see people sheepishly milling about the lawn, staring at the ground and kicking some grass to kill time as they take care of business. “That’s what’s going on in there? Everyone’s just farting?” Schumer asks. “Hopefully,” a stranger replies. “We’ve seen some accidents.”
The camera zeroes in on the hunter green parks department sign that’s familiar to New Yorkers. Over the usual circle-enshrouded leaf, it reads in stark letters: “FART PARK.” There’s an outrageousness to the mundanity of it all. I’m laughing again.
If you’ve seen Inside Amy Schumer, the Emmy-winning comedy series that made Schumer a star, you know that the sketch doesn’t end by solely making the perfectly alliterative joke. (“All fart and no bite, as we like to say around here,” is another gem.) It escalates into outlandish territory: Schumer falls in love with a fellow farter, there’s a murder in Fart Park, and she becomes a famous author after writing about it. “I had a moment where I was like…I don’t think we need a murder at Fart Park,” Schumer later says in a video explaining the origins of the sketch. “And everybody was like, you’re an idiot, Amy. There has to be a murder at Fart Park.”
Juvenile as we are, we giggle every time we see the words “Fart Park.” But it’s not necessarily the best sketch of the two Season 5 episodes that premiered this week. And it’s certainly not the most important. It will likely get passed around and shared, and will absolutely enter the lexicon. (As if I will ever pass a park in New York City now without mentioning “Fart Park.”) It’s a more genial, accessible example of Schumer’s comedy, which, as the new season of Inside Amy Schumer proves, is more pointed, more political, and more uncomfortable than ever before.
The fifth season of Inside Amy Schumer was actually greenlit in January 2016. That’s quite a time stamp; suffice it to say that it was a much different world then. There was no Paramount+, for starters. I only cried once a week compared to once an hour; I don’t think I had even started my daily screaming-into-a-pillow yet. It would be trite to detail the social and political change that has happened, or the trauma we’ve all weathered. In the years since, Schumer herself has gotten married, had a child, become a passionate activist, and cemented her status as a lightning rod in comedy.
Ever the lemming, I’ve joined the legions of people who, in recent years, have relied on television for comfort. I might as well be president of the Basic Bitch Convention, with my ecstatic embrace of “nice TV” like Schitt’s Creek, Abbott Elementary, and Ted Lasso. I rolled my eyes at everyone’s marathon watches of The Office and Gilmore Girls during the pandemic to soothe themselves. I’m far more sophisticated; I rewatched 30 Rock and Sex and the City. “Who has the time or the desire to watch something as dark and depraved as House of the Dragon?” I said to myself as I settled down to watch my ninth Bravo show of the week—which I followed up by turning on an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives that I’ve already seen. Four times.
There’s nothing wrong with craving pop culture that makes you feel good when everything else is terrible. I’m actually grateful for a shift back toward earnestness in comedy, even if the real-world catalyst for the trend was so bleak. But watching the new season of Inside Amy Schumer was interesting because it reminded me of what was so gratifying about a certain kind of television that we had run away from or flat-out rejected. Schumer is as skilled as ever at making comedy that challenges, at finding jokes in the things that are woefully unpleasant about life.
It goes without saying that, glancing at the male-dominated sketch-comedy landscape, Schumer’s perspective is distinct. There are memorable sketches in the first two episodes revolving around the pressure to wear Spanx, being the only woman working at a tampon company, and feeling the need to justify procedures women have done in order to live up to unrealistic beauty standards. She’s also fearlessly political.
“Colorado” satirizes the kind of commercial that tourism boards make to attract visitors. In it, Schumer’s singing the praises of a place that is beautiful and definitely worth visiting, especially if you happen to live in a surrounding state that has banned abortion. It’s merciless, more so if you let yourself ponder the reality that a state really could—and maybe even should—make an advertisement like this.
There’s another sketch in which female college students excitedly meet with their dorm R.A. for the first time. As they go through their welcome packages, they’re confused. Rape whistles? Mace? Where is the fun in that? The sketch is smartly casual; the R.A. is matter-of-fact and ambivalent about the college’s institutionalized mistreatment of women and indifference to their safety and justice, but the things she is saying are pointed.
It was interesting to watch the episodes at a premiere screening in New York with a crowd. There was a palpable tenseness as this sketch aired. People didn’t seem to know when it was appropriate to laugh, or even if laughing was allowed at all. (The correct answer is: through the whole thing. It was really funny, and the comedy and its intended impact aren’t mutually exclusive.)
What’s remarkable about Inside Amy Schumer’s six-year hiatus is that I’m not sure it even could have existed in those six years. Would I have wanted to watch comedy about the things that were happening? Would I have been able to laugh? The fifth season of the show feels evolved, because we’ve all evolved. Well…evolved to a point. I’m still laughing about “Fart Park.”
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