Amy Schumer Finally Learns How to Smile Like a Normal Person

The season finale of Inside Amy Schumer aired Tuesday night with a trio of pitch-perfect sketches, a sexy performance of “Put Your Dick Away” by Bridget Everett, and a surprise engagement between two members of the show’s crew.

The best of the night was “Love Your Smile,” in which Amy’s assistant sends her to a “smile guy,” the always-creepy Jon Glaser, to improve her red carpet look. The female expression is rarely left to its own devices, an irritating phenomenon that is vastly amplified by fame; the resulting grimace is a fist in the air for pissy-faced women everywhere.

Elsewhere in the episode, Schumer makes fun of those too easily swayed by the lure of a British accent (“The sex is amazing. He can’t really keep an erection, but his accent just does it for me”), and in “Three Buttholes,” Amy gets dumped after casually revealing some abnormalities and asking her companion, “You wanna play me like a flute?”

Season three of Inside Amy Schumer has been even more consistently great than past seasons, mixing sharp, darkly perceptive social observation with a heavy dose of gleeful absurdity. She gave Bill Cosby a fair trial, watched 12 Angry Men vote on whether she was hot enough for television, wrote the song of the summer, celebrated Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ last fuckable day, enlisted Bill Nye to explain The Universe, and drank a gallon of white wine while her husband taught his football team: “Clear eyes, full hearts, don’t rape.”

In a profile that ran today in the New York Times, which also touches on the recent controversy surrounding her “blind spot” on race, the comedian is described as “[e]qual parts naughty cheerleader, self-deprecating Everywoman and fearless truth-teller … Ms. Schumer connects with women and men alike, all while she lampoons them and the media’s lopsided portrayals.”

To Michele Schreiber, who teaches film and media at Emory University, Ms. Schumer’s comedy is “perfectly suited to a changing cultural landscape in which the word ‘feminism’ is slowly losing its negative connotations,” she said, adding that Ms. Schumer “dispels the most persistent point about feminists, which is that feminists can’t take a joke.”

But striking a balance between political and funny is still “very, very challenging,” she said. That Ms. Schumer pulls it off “makes her kind of sneakily, incredibly powerful.”