Um, Amy Schumer.

Comedy tends to be used as a platform for social criticism and philosophical challenge in modern society but it is ultimately a form of entertainment and involves communication of the comedian as actor to their audience. The significance of the character a comedian portrays is that it defines and develops the type of relationship a comedian will have with their audience.  Female comedians when engaged in humour, not necessarily just about fecundity (sexual behaviour) are placed in a spectrum of promiscuity that is different from the spectrum a male comedian would be placed into (Foy 703 : 2015), the female comedian is ultimately seen as being more libidinous for engaging in subversive humour.  Some of Amy Schumer’s comedy skits work by portraying the difference between the social expectations of the female engaged in ostensibly libidinous behaviour and the reality, the cognitive dissonance and taboo content of the skit are the source of humour (See cellphone sext skit).

In doing so, by portraying a female somewhat clumsily fulfilling the required social norms contained in the libidinous role the female comedian is negotiating her relationship with her audience in the context of potentially being placed in a high spectrum of promiscuity, which could potentially reduce the empathy the audience has with the character she is portraying. 

According to Windholz (8 : 2015) comediennes such as Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller and Maria Bamford have developed stage personas characterized by strange, eccentric and abnormal behaviour  that negotiates  their character as different from the perceived role of a woman, in that it occupies a more “male” position, that for all its problems of classification, gets described as featuring more aggressive and self depreciative styles of humour (LaCorte 13 : 2015) (Windholz 8 : 2015). Amy Schumer’s more sexually explicit humour tends to get described as adopting the “male gaze”, but I wonder if it's possible that she is simply demonstrating that Laura Mulvey’s “Male Gaze” concept can be used for both genders, in different contexts of power. Actually, after doing the typical google search, which does not represent specialist knowledge, it has already been done, via Bracha Ettinger and ideas of subject object based on a-priori difference but the argument I am making here is that when Amy Schumer adopts a libidinous persona and appropriates the “Male Gaze” she is doing it for the cognitive dissonance and taboo content to create an amusing experience for her audience, competent humour contains an element of play.

There is a definite political dimension to her humour, it is a stage for valid social criticism and in interviews she casts her humour as having a strong autobiographical component, which is interesting, which it is meant to be.  Benamin Windholz (36 : 2015) describes Amy Schumers stage persona as the” attractive unruly woman”, interpreting her in the context of Bakhtin carnivalesque, focusing on her use of body, race and fecundity  as a subversion of the interpretation of the human body in contemporary modern society (Windholz 34 : 2015) and notes her critique or possibly subversion of the trope of the entitled white girl as a way of claiming legitimacy for her voice. I suspect she detects social issues the same way most of us do, it’s not a theoretical approach, in our daily lives we detect the effects of power and the boundaries imposed and consider what it means, it is an approach born from experience and less from theory.

Or a brilliant team of comedy writers, seriously what would I really know?

Bibliography

Foy, Jennifer. (March  2015). Fooling Around : Female Stand-Ups and Sexual Joking. In The Journal of Popular Culture. Volume 48, Issue 4. Page 703.

LaCorte, Steven. (2015). An Examination of Personal Humour Style and Humour Appreciation in Others.  Senior Honors Project  at John Carrol University. Page 13.

Windholz, Benamin. (2014). My Eyes are Up Here. The Comedy of Amy Schumer and the Carnivalesque.  Thesis at Kansas State University,  Senior Colloquium in Communication Studies. Pages 8, 34 & 36.