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Review: Amy Schumer pops up at Blue Note Hawaii

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COURTESY COMEDY CENTRAL

Amy Schumer in a scene from her Comedy Central program, “Inside Amy Schumer.” Photos were not allowed at the comedian’s Blue Note Hawaii appearance on Monday night.

An expressive crowd of Amy Schumer fans packed the Blue Note Hawaii on Monday night, selling out the venue in less than an hour after it was announced that the crude, cute comedian would appear in a pop-up show that day.

Wanda Sykes, who is working with Schumer on a film that’s being shot in Hawaii, and film crew member/folk-blues guitarist “Spice” were also along for the ride, with Honolulu comedian Shane Lucas Price there to introduce the show and act as emcee.

The show was loose and casual, with the performers all dressed as if they’d just walked in off the street after a day wandering Honolulu.

Spice, a bearded, middle-aged crew electrician with an acoustic guitar, said, “Amy happened to look over the lanai this morning and said, ‘Would you like to open for me at the Blue Note tonight?’ ”

Sykes made a good impression, her blunt talk and acute sense of timing a complement to Schumer’s approach. She warmed up the crowd quickly with jokes about Hawaii’s easy living, and moved on to a warm, personal routine that focused on her observations and experience as a black woman in America.

One of her better riffs explored life with “new” breasts, after undergoing breast reduction surgery — and the encouragement her new pals provided to act like a younger person: “Shots! Shots!”

“I know we’re trying to make it to a colorblind society, but I see (stuff),” Sykes said, leading into jokes about her life with a white wife and two pale-skinned (“we’re talking ‘Frozen’ ”) children.

The 52-year-old comic’s polished delivery was also accentuated by the comparative brevity of her performance; Sykes was on stage for less than half an hour, while Schumer’s stand-up lasted about 70 minutes.

The crowd was there to hear Schumer, though, and the room laughed loudly and listened intently to her routines.

She danced onto the stage, cradling a coffee cup that was soon revealed to hold wine. Her hair was pulled back; she wore jeans and a black tank top covered with a plaid shirt.

A good bit of her show included routines she has been touring across the country, with belly laugh-inducing jokes about awkward sex, her own body and drunken, awkward sex.

She mimed passive sex, showed off her lower-back tattoo and invited the audience to scrutinize her thighs.

“I didn’t even know what a thigh gap was,” she said, wide-eyed, playing into the naive-yet-assertive character she often portrays on stage. “Is that, like, a wage gap? Do we have to rally against that?”

Schumer also improvised, delivering outspoken lines about the experience of blowing up into one of the nation’s hottest film, television and comedy stars over the past year.

“What happened to me over the past year was … insane,” she said.

After Schumer posed for a photo semi-clad in a sitting position, so that the rolls formed by her belly were visible, multiple critics called her “brave.”

“The word you don’t want to hear when you take your clothes off,” Schumer joked.

Schumer’s prime appeal lies in her brassy depiction of a woman who wants sex, drinks too much, shuns self-improvement and feels no shame.

Despite the jokes, the fact is that to be unapologetically sexual and imperfect is a brave move, raising the self-esteem and morale of countless female fans.

And so, recounting her diet to appear in “Trainwreck,” Schumer’s hit comedy of 2015, she promised never to do that again.

“Thankfully, I look stupid skinny, because my cabbage-patch head stays the same size,” she said. “I looked like a Thanksgiving parade float of Tonya Harding.”

She also gave Hawaii some love, asking, “How are you not hiking right now?”

“I saw a baby on the pillbox hike,” she said. “It was wearing a diaper, and it just blew past me.”

The audience became relatively quiet as Schumer went political during a couple of forays, joking about opponents of gun control, or describing an evening spent sitting next to Hillary Clinton, but the crowd did not seem to drift away.

Her crude, good-humored descriptions of consummated sex acts with her boyfriends, past and present, were even tougher for a few audience members. A few in the crowd, evidently unfamiliar with her brand of womancentric raunch, visibly blanched at Schumer’s graphic descriptions.

Most, however, were there to laugh right along with Schumer’s jabs at men and women; and at her (realized) fears of saying something racist, insensitive to people with disabilities, or dismissive of optimistic Christian evangelism.

“I’m not going to be a famous person for very long, so you’re smart to come here,” she said, projecting a backlash.

With a couple of new movies in progress, however, and a growing number of avid fans, Schumer doesn’t look to be shrinking from the spotlight any time soon.

2 responses to “Review: Amy Schumer pops up at Blue Note Hawaii”

  1. honupono says:

    It was liberal, unapologetic and adult. Real observations about real people. Things you thought about but didn’t say out loud. It’s letting us know that despite our differences, some celebrities are just like us. Her message, live lfe freely without caring what people think. Most important of all, this was to raise money for the Windward Spouse Abuse Center.

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