It’s been nearly a decade, but Amy Schumer still hasn’t topped her 12 Angry Men parody from 2015. And, at this point—with former fans abandoning her in light of her recent controversial opinions and an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm for her new Netflix movie—it seems plausible that she never will.
In Schumer’s defense, it’s difficult for anything to best that near-perfect comedy sketch. It aired as the third episode of the third season of Schumer’s Comedy Central series, Inside Amy Schumer, which you can stream free on Hulu. Typically, the show featured at least five short sketches per episode. But “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” broke format with a single, black-and-white, 18-minute long bit.
Schumer, who co-wrote and co-directed the sketch, assembled a team of talented actors to recreate Sidney Lumet’s critically acclaimed 1957 courtroom drama, 12 Angry Men, about a lone juror who convinces his fellow jury members to vote “Not Guilty” for a teenager accused of murder. The twist? The accused is Schumer, and her alleged crime is that of “not being hot enough to have a television show.”
Not being hot enough for TV is—as the judge (played by Dennis Quaid) sternly informs Schumer —”a heinous crime.” Jeff Goldblum leads the team of twelves jurors in a preliminary vote to see who among them thinks Schumer is not hot enough to be on television. Only one man (played by Oscar-nominated actor John Hawkes) declines to raise his hand.
Over the next 15 minutes or so, Hawkes takes on the role of Henry Fonda’s 12 Angry Men character. He’s on a mission to acquit Schumer, not on the basis of reasonable doubt, but rather, on the basis of “reasonable chub,” meaning that each man in the room might plausibly, under the right circumstances, find Schumer attractive.
Every word of the sketch is pure gold, but some stand-out lines include Kumail Nanjiani’s argument that “the more she’s out there flaunting that chipmunk face, the more her type becomes acceptable;” Chris Beetem’s charitable suggestion that “maybe she could play somebody like a wacky neighbor, or a divorced obese woman with a funny dog;” and Paul Giamatti’s point that “no women are funny, but you have to hear them blab, they better at least be hot.”
What makes the sketch so brilliant—in addition to the pitch-perfect recreation of the original movie’s melodramatic tone—is that this is, quite literally, how the internet sounds when talking about Schumer. It doesn’t seem to matter what else Schumer does to offend. (And she’s done plenty!) There will always be a man in the corner who simply must chime in to announce he wouldn’t have sex with her.
This is not a problem of the past, either. Simply scroll down on the trailer for Schumer’s movie Kinda Pregnant on YouTube—a comedy coming to Netflix tomorrow, starring Schumer as a woman who fakes a pregnancy for attention—and you’ll find dozens of comments that freely and confidently discuss Schumer’s body. (One comment, with over one hundred upvotes, reads, “spoiler alert: The belly is NOT fake.”)
Schumer has taken on the topic of body-shaming many times, but never has she demonstrated quite so effectively how psychotic these comments sound than when she lined them all up back-to-back, and had them read out with the utmost gravitas by world-class actors.
“Look, we’ve all at some point in our lives gotten a semi for a girl with a pillowy stomach or Muppet tits,” Hawkes implores at one point, pacing the room.
“Has the world gone mad?” Nick Di Paolo rages to heavens, a little bit later. “This girl thinks she deserves to be on television? She’s not a 10!”
With one genius idea and flawless execution, Schumer managed to both make herself the butt of the joke and put these creeps in their place. It’s hilarious, it’s feminist, and it’s not at all preachy. Schumer simply lets these men, and these types of comments, hang their own noose. No need to point out how gross these guys are being—it’s all there on the page.
Nothing Schumer has done since has managed to find that perfect balance since. A few months after “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” aired, the comedian’s first movie, Trainwreck, opened in theaters. It’s easily her best film, though not quite as concise and clean as the sketch. Still, 2015 remains Schumer’s best era. It’s the year she won her first and only Emmy Award for Inside Amy Schumer, and she even snagged a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for Trainwreck.
Since Inside Amy Schumer ended in 2016 (and was briefly revived for a poorly received, five-episode season on Paramount+ in 2022), Schumer’s failed to recapture the magic. Her 2018 film, I Feel Pretty, was, according to the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, not particularly well-like by either critics or audiences. The review embargo for Kinda Pregnant has not yet lifted (it lifts on the day of release, never a great sign!), but the general sentiment surrounding the movie seems tepid at best.
It likely doesn’t help that Schumer has been a vocal supporter of Israel during the recent war in Gaza, including sharing a now-deleted Instagram comic that mocked anti-war protestors, with one protestor holding a sign that said “Gazans rape Jewish girls only in self-defense.” The goodwill from Schumer fans who were still holding out for a return to form has, for the most part, dried up.
But we’ll always have “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” a perfect sketch that only proves more relevant with time. It may be the height of Schumer’s comedy career, but at least it’s a pretty damn good view.