Last week, an article in The Guardian — most of which discussed the intelligence and progressiveness of Amy Schumer’s work — asserted that the acclaimed comedian’s one blind spot was race. This, in turn, led other critics — who’d perhaps formerly been caught up in a year of being deeply and understandably Schumer-enamored — to consider this one shortcoming, and that, yes, there was room for improvement.
Schumer’s response to said “blind spot” suddenly being on the media’s radar was — despite her usual tendency to transcend comedic norms — a pretty typical defense. She’d said:
You can call it a ‘blind spot for racism’ or ‘lazy’ but you are wrong. It is a joke and it is funny. I know that because people laugh at it.
Since Schumer’s comedy can be so insightfully political — and since a large portion of her show is devoted to interviews excavating and talking through certain taboos — it struck many as strange that her response to such a critique was a seeming attempt to shut down a dialogue.
Today, however, the comedian decided to reopen discussion: she responded to a Tweet questioning her about one of the jokes that contributed to those perceptions of the “blind spot around race” — a joke from a former standup routine where she said, “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.” She wrote: