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What can we learn from Amy Schumer's pregnancy docuseries? - The Guardian

What can we learn from Amy Schumer's pregnancy docuseries? - The Guardian

What can we learn from Amy Schumer's pregnancy docuseries? - The Guardian
Jul 07, 2020 1 min, 57 secs

The HBO Max series, directed by Alexander Hammer and Ryan Cunningham, is, like much of Schumer’s comedy, a record of excess – in this case, of sickness, a body in revolt and, less prominent but richer, the demands of forwarding a highly public career throughout.

Filmed from the fall of 2018 through 2019, the series is billed, in name and in structure (the first two episodes, available for critics, are titled “Conception” and “Gestation”) as a pregnancy series, one channeling Schumer’s longstanding brand of fearlessness, carnal humor and dicing of post-feminism’s hypocrisy and obfuscation into behind-the-scenes documentary.

Expecting Amy works best as an exploration of comedy’s messy boundaries – what personal interactions get filtered, streamlined and edited into a set, what off-stage moments of wryness and levity form a stage persona, what shame or fear performance can excise or exploit.

The series eschews any talking heads or much formality at all, instead relying on on-the-fly footage of Schumer and often Fischer, sister Kim Caramele, and friends Rachel Feinstein and Bridget Everett in cars, bathrooms, trains, splayed on backstage couches, on stage.

But while Schumer’s brand of exposure and flouting taboos is boundless – one episode intro finds her sitting on the toilet in her hospital gown, half-asleep, struggling to pee – Expecting Amy stops short of revealing much about her clearly dauntless ambition, or grappling with the scrutiny of millions; like Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, Schumer’s series is most interesting not in the bulk of what is revealed, but what moments are hinted, seemingly off-hand, or left out.

“Are we celebrating how strong you are, or are you telling me that you have a problem with me saying something on stage?” she says, adding: “My standup is not more important than our marriage.” The argument loops over, its threads picked up and put down, and feels raw and treacherously vulnerable in a way the many shots of Schumer’s nausea do not; one wonders what those conversations of the line between reality and performance looked like

“And pleased and peaceful and manic and hopeless and so hopeful it’s crazy.” In its best moments, Expecting Amy embraces this kind of mess, of contradictions, blurred lines between reality and performance and self-awareness – “I know how I am, no one else can deal with it, I know that,” she tells Fischer through tears

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