So is Amy Schumer’s dad really as outrageous as the way you play him? In the movie, he teaches his young daughters to chant, “Monogamy isn’t realistic.”
Her father was this wild guy when [she and her sister] were growing up. A nice guy but, like, a playboy–a wild boy. But he also got MS in his early 40s. So he got a real Zen attitude because of this thing that hit him out of nowhere. He’s pretty open about his life. He doesn’t try to sugarcoat things.
On Inside Amy Schumer, the comedy is pretty cutting. How do you think it translated into a rom-com?
There’s an undertone of something in the movie–I don’t know if it’s a bleakness–there’s an undertone of brutality, of comic brutality. Judd captured that.
You’re doing another history-based one-man show with Jerry Seinfeld directing New York Story, which looks at the city starting with the Dutch. Why does the past appeal to you as a comedian?
Two reasons. One is, everything is history if it’s a day old. And two, because I was so bad at science and math when I was growing up that I was left with no choice. It would be like talking to a third-grader if you asked me any mathematical thing.
How do you keep up your pace of as many as 10 Twitter posts a day?
It’s a sickness, like an addiction. I have all these regulars who follow me, and they’re trying to outdo each other with creative ways to tell me they hate my guts and wish I would get hit by a truck or die in a fire. You find out that all these other people are pretty funny but not as funny as they think sometimes.
This appears in the July 27, 2015 issue of TIME.
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