‘I really can’t shut my mouth up’: Catching up with Amy Schumer ahead of Just for Laughs Toronto

Though it’s a pleasure to talk to Amy Schumer, it might also feel a bit redundant, because few people in public life are as public about private matters as the seasoned standup comedian. As she told the New Yorker recently, “I don’t know why I don’t have any boundaries,” or as she told the Star even more bluntly, “I really can’t shut my mouth up.”

There are a couple of virtues in that, though. For one, being an open book allows for any of her life experiences to become comedy of one or another. Curious about her sexual experiences? See any of her standup specials. (An early joke: “I walked in on him masturbating. He’s like, ‘Are you mad?’ I’m like, ‘Uh no, but you seem to be … Does it owe you money?’” A later one, on being famous and pregnant: “Once people knew, they were like, ‘is she showing?’ and they were like ‘No more than normal. Just kinda looks like she took her Spanx off.’”)

Interested in her childhood traumas, or how she met her husband? It’s there, fictionalized, in her TV series “Life & Beth,” co-starring Toronto’s own Michael Cera (featuring grown women quitting a nightclub early by proclaiming, “I think Nordstrom Rack is still open”). Are you, for some reason, keen to see the miserable details of her torturous pregnancy, down to footage of her Caesarean section? See her three-part documentary “Expecting Amy.”

Another virtue of Schumer’s extreme candour is that if, ahem, a technical problem on a Star writer’s end consumes much of his records of an interview — on the eve of the star’s much-anticipated return to Toronto — America’s frankest performer has already been laying everything on the table with journalists coast to coast, whether it’s about the death threats she fielded after hosting the Oscars, (“I was like, ‘I think you have the wrong number. It’s Amy, not Will (Smith)”) to getting liposuction to her past with trichotillomania (a compulsion to pull her hair out that left bald spots akin to “what a monster and a goblin have.”)

Casual fans might therefore think they’re up to date, but Schumer assures the Star there have been lots of thus-far-unmentioned events that will help fuel her standup set, Friday at the Coca-Cola Coliseum as part of Just for Laughs Toronto. There’s more on married life, and there’s raising her three-year-old son Gene: “And I used to have a uterus, so … ”

Yes, there’s that; choosing a hysterectomy, after a medical ordeal of a pregnancy and a long struggle with endometriosis, is already the stuff of a starkly graphic joke: her removed uterus makes an almost-jolly on-camera appearance, tucked discreetly after the credits of each “Life & Beth” episode.

So it’s been an eventful journey through stardom’s ranks for Schumer, 41, since her inaugural Just For Laughs in Toronto, as the surprise final name added to the very first lineup here. Enchanted by her TV appearances, fans in 2012 had demanded she be part of it: “We’re getting all these (messages), ‘Book Amy Schumer!’” the fest’s programming director Robbie Praw (now Netflix’s vice-president of standup) said at the time.

That last-minute show in Toronto was something of a sensation. She lamented drinking to excess — “Nothing good ever happens (when you) black out. You never wake up like, ‘What’s this Pilates mat doing out? Who cleaned?’” — and recalled refusing a certain sexual act by exclaiming “No! My father loved me!” and generally rather tore the roof off the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

After that came her Emmy-winning sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer,” starring movie roles in “Trainwreck” and more, and the inevitable book; she became the first female standup to headline at Madison Square Garden. It’s possible staying at that level would have required keeping quiet about certain matters, and that wasn’t going to happen.

“Expecting Amy” viewers can watch her getting arrested during that brutal pregnancy for protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation; she also denounced Donald Trump during a 2016 show as a “fake-college-starting monster.” It’s been observed that her venues are no longer arenas, but (mostly huge) theatres.

In her honest way, she does keep track of these things. Shrugging off comparisons to “(Dave) Chappelle or these comics who I guess have more integrity than me, who are like, ‘I’d rather do five shows’” in humbler spots, she told the Hollywood Reporter, “I’m like, ‘I want to go where the hockey team plays.’”

If motherhood and the pandemic kept her away from touring for a bit, and if the demand is now only huge and not colossal, the woman who told the Star in 2014 that “I don’t like idle time” was busily creating anyhow. “Life & Beth” is getting a second season and, in this week’s most exciting news, “Inside Amy Schumer” returns next month on Paramount Plus. (She tells the Star that fans can look forward to very smart and very silly sketches; titles like “Murder in Fart Park” and “Skinnygirl Coffins by Bethenny Frankel” have been circulating.)

All this during a return to the road. When asked about her future aspirations, in 2014 she mentioned doing theatre, which she in time did and earned a Tony nomination; now, she says, she hopes to direct a movie but says, in a voice both warm and weary, “I’d like to spend more time at home with my family.”

After all, young Gene is a favourite audience/collaborator these days: “When he goes on the swings, I stand in front off him and act like he’s kicked my head off. That bit,” she says, is really scoring.

So time not at home has to be rewarding. Her beyond-candid disclosures to the New Yorker (“I have 20 million dollars liquid”) precede her reminding the Star that doing the road involves “preparing for the road, doing shows” — for example, dropping in at New York comedy clubs — “for no money.” Which she does for charity as well, “but if I’m going to be away from my family …”

Fans at Friday’s show can therefore note her sacrifice in being there (with openers Mia Jackson and Jaye McBride) and also note, with satisfaction, that it’s at the home of the Toronto Marlies. Not the big barn, not yet, but near as the Star can tell, it’s her first arena show since the pandemic.

“Yeah, I’m glad to be playing the hockey rink. Bring a sweater.”

Garnet Fraser is a deputy entertainment editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @garnetfraser

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