From Amy Schumer to Waterford Whispers: two kinds of political comedy

The very funny Amy Schumer is in Dublin for a premiere of her new Judd Apatow directed movie, Trainwreck. There was a live event with her alongside another cultural icon, Panti Bliss, at the O'Reilly Theatre in Belvedere College, Dublin, on Thursday night.

Schumer is tearing up the zeitgeist. The star of the witty and profane sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, she's not just discussed as an actress and comedian but as a new voice of feminism. This is thanks to some blackly satirical sketches that we get to see over here on late at night on Comedy Central or as little viral injections on Youtube (actually the online hits are bigger than the actual show, which has a modest audience).

She has tackled topics such as: Sexism in Hollywood (Amy helps middle-aged female stars celebrate Julia Louis Dreyfus's "last f*ckable day"); Rape in the military (a very realistic military game);  Rape in football (a pastiche of small-town drama Friday Night Lights); Rape apologism (the trial of Bill Cosby); Realistic female body image… sort of (the Amy doll); and porn.

In short, she is a kind of a genius.

In American media over the past ten years, comedy has, weirdly, become part of the national discussion. Formerly, political comics were seen as iconoclastic outsiders, like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, shooting in at the mainstream from outside the beltway.

Now comedians and comedy writers like Schumer or Lena Dunham or Louis CK or Chris Rock or Amy Poehler, are regularly fodder for broadsheet think pieces and are seen as foot soldiers in the culture wars.

Serious people in America take comedy seriously. President Barack Obama was recently interviewed in the comedian Marc Maron's garage for Maron's WTF podcast. The leader of the free world also subjected himself to a more surreal grilling by Zach Galifianakis in Between Two Ferns.

Potshots at the clueless
If anyone signalled the rise of the significant funny person, it was Jon Stewart on The Daily Show (where the US president was also interviewed). He somehow took a programme that took potshots at clueless news networks and politicians and made it a cultural force and moral voice.

The format spun off into The Colbert Report, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and, most interestingly, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which dissects serious political issues in witty 20-minute chunks and optimistically clings to a faith in democratic change.

But it's not just the erroneously titled "fake news" genre that has heft. Stand-up comedy in America has become more reflective and thought provoking (Tig Notaro, Chelsea Peretti, Louis CK), and even the TV sitcom has become less afraid of darker issues (Bojack Horseman, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). Comedy is where hip American millennials learn to think.

Of course, Stewart has always been appalled at the suggestion that his oeuvre is a serious social and political force. He sees the ascent of The Daily Show as a sad consequence of a wider political culture tarnished by polarised bullshittery.

Irish invective
But the discussion can fail in other ways. In Ireland, our best known examples of political comedy are perceived as happening well outside any mainstream debate. The Savage Eye, Irish Pictorial Weekly and Waterford Whispers were/are, at their best (and they are frequently brilliant), fuelled by anger and self-loathing and a sense of melancholy exclusion. They never even pretend to be able to effect change.

No-one in Ireland writes think-pieces about how our comedians and satirists are galvanising a generation, unless what they’re galvanising them into is a sense of fatalistic despondency - “Ah that’s how it is,” we laugh sadly as the ship sinks. “We really are the worst.” Though, to be fair, this probably says more about the failings of our sluggishly centrist political culture than it does about the satirists.

Do they look enviously on as US comedians are treated as truth-telling public intellectuals? Maybe not. That brings its own problems. One thing is sure - comedy in America is a serious business. Now watch this Amy Schumer sketch about what boobs and butts are for.