Amy Schumer: Its not all coprophilia anymore
Amy Schumer: It's not all coprophilia anymore.

A touching little moment happened in the unlikeliest place last night. Comedian/actress Amy Schumer performed a set of new and newish material at the Emerald Queen Casino’s I-5 Showroom—or, as she referred to it, “an airplane hangar” at “the Emerald Something Casino"—for an over-capacity crowd. The room holds 2,000, but 2,300 were estimated to be inside. It probably won’t shock you to learn that the Emerald Queen’s Saturday-night scene was like Idiocracy given form. I understand that famous comics like to work out their new stuff in off-brand towns—Chris Rock said he goes to West Palm Beach, Florida—to make sure they aren’t simply pandering to hip rooms. If that’s what motivated Schumer to perform in the I-5 Showroom so soon before the premiere of Inside Amy Schumer’s third season (April 21) and the premiere of Trainwreck, the new Judd Apatow-directed movie she wrote and stars in (July 17), well, let’s just say SHE KNOWS HOW TO PICK ’EM.

The strategy didn’t serve opener Rachel Feinstein very well. She opened with a joke about gun ownership— the premise of which involved the assumption that maybe it wasn’t the coolest thing ever—and the room didn’t so much groan or boo as cock its collective head, like a dog hearing an unfamiliar noise. (Feinstein won them over in the end.)

Anyway, there’s every chance that every instant of Schumer’s set is already available on YouTube, but I will say that when she comes back through these parts on a victory lap tour after what will probably be a triumphant year (by which time, I imagine the set’s construction will be airtight) you should go. You get exposed to so much okay/not-bad/pretty-good humor entertainment content now that it’s easy to forget how physically exhilarating it feels to spend an hour-plus in the hands of an actual master of the stand-up craft.

The unexpectedly touching moment came about five minutes from the end of Schumer’s set, when she interrupted a strong hunk about sex terms (“A Dirty Rochester is when a guy shits on your chest—while he’s on a business trip to Rochester… unless I was lied to”) to give a shout-out to Dylan Avila, the local comic who was assaulted while onstage at a Renton club in January. Avila was hospitalized with a double skull fracture after a man hit him twice with an aluminum baseball bat (the alleged attacker was a would-be open mic performer who had been asked not to return).

Schumer said she wanted to make sure she didn’t forget to introduce a fellow comic who’d been “brutally attacked” onstage, but was in the audience. “Any time you do this, it is a risk,” she said. “We’re pretty vulnerable. I’ve had people throw shit at me, and storm the stage to try and beat the shit out of me, and it really happened to Dylan. But he’s made a full recovery and he’s back onstage.”

She didn’t make a maudlin scene out of it, no blue spot, no “Can I get real with you guys for a minute?” It was just a word of encouragement from a big star to a fellow trouper. A big ovation followed. Schumer encouraged people to follow Dylan on Twitter, though she neglected to say his handle, or, indeed, his last name—both easily googled (@dylanavila, PS).

Then it was back to the sex terms.

Dylan Avila: fully recovered?
Dylan Avila: fully recovered?