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Despite the long history of stand-up comedy in popular culture, there has been little sociological attention to the \"cultural work\" of stand-up. Engaging the sociological imagination, comedy has the capacity to undo cultural assumptions and create new meanings, often revealing the constructedness of social life. The popular and controversial comedian Amy Schumer is emblematic of a recent emergence of women comedians who subtly encourage their audiences to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, and other issues. Drawing from Goffman-inspired symbolic interactionism in conjunction with feminist media sociology, this paper analyzes Amy Schumer's Mostly Sex Stuff stand-up performance as a narrative text and discusses how Schumer plays with, and often challenges, dominant cultural discourses on sex, gender performance, and race through comedic storytelling.

Narrowcast methods—first cable, then the internet—have enabled entertainers to target media to highly specific audiences. This poses an existential problem for twenty-first-century satire: in delivering satire, narrowcasting can exclude both apathetic viewers and those who deny that this issue is a problem. This audience balkanization is reflected in how commentators discuss satire, and those discussions further structure audiences’ experiences with satire. This article considers three sketches from Amy Schumer and the commentary about those sketches, finding that Schumer's satire makes harsher judgments and becomes less laughable the more narrowly it is cast. This shift is a potential problem for contemporary satirists and satire scholars: the shrinking of audience size that accompanies narrowcasting satire may weaken its ability to catalyze ideological change. Given satire's contemporary popularity, this weakening may threaten an already-imperiled deliberative culture.