Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Don’t Rape

UPDATE May 5, 2015 – Journalist Jessica Goldstein at ThinkProgress wrote a behind-the-scenes article on Schumer’s “Football Town Nights” sketch, which manages to highlight the connection between football and rape while still getting laughs. [At press time, 100 percent of FunnyorOffensive users think the sketch is funny.]

Goldstein writes,

“Inside Amy Schumer writer Christine Nangle got the idea for the sketch years ago when she was reading about the Steubenville rape case. It wasn’t just the brutality of the rape itself — a teenage girl was assaulted by multiple football players while she was too drunk to consent — but the aftershocks of that earthquake that intensified Nangle’s horror…”

What follows is an insightful article on how that horror turned into great comedy. In it, Goldstein continues,

“It was conscious choice not to put any girls in [the sketch],” Nangle said, partly “to not necessarily show the boys as malicious monsters” but really to make the story about “trying to figure out the messages that they’re getting. I don’t want that to say that any of these guys who do terrible things aren’t in charge of their actions, but in this particular sense, I wanted it to be about their surroundings.”

April 22, 2015 – Amy Schumer tackles rape and football in her new Friday Night Lights parody called “Football Town Nights.” With the help of former The Good Wife actor Josh Charles, the clip, which aired on Inside Amy Schumer last night, features a series locker room question and answers such as…

PLAYER 1: Can we rape at away games?

JOSH CHARLES: Nope.

PLAYER 2: What if she’s dressed like a sexy cat?

CHARLES: Nope.

PLAYER 3: What if the girl said yes but then she changed her mind out of nowhere? Like a crazy person?

CHARLES: You gotta stop.

PLAYER 4: No, YOU gotta stop!

Schumer’s been proactive about any Twitter freak outs. “[Joking about rape] is always a risk,” she told an audience at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the week. “You might look at this scene and think we’re making light of something serious, but we really are trying to educate. We know what message we want to send, and then we also think the premise is funny, and then we go to town.”

So? Is Amy Schumer’s “Football Town Nights” funny or offensive? Vote now!