Amy Beth Schumer (born June 1, 1981) is an American stand-up comedian, actress, writer, producer, and director. Schumer ventured into comedy in the early 2000s before appearing as a contestant on the fifth season of the NBC reality competition series Last Comic Standing in 2007. From 2013 to 2016, she was the creator, co-producer, co-writer, and star of the Comedy Central sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, for which she received a Peabody Award and was nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards, winning Outstanding Variety Sketch Series in 2015.
Schumer wrote and made her film debut in a starring role in Trainwreck (2015), for which she received nominations for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. She published a memoir in 2016, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, which held the top position on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list for two weeks. The same year, she was nominated for two Grammy Awards: for Best Comedy Album for Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo, and Best Spoken Word Album for The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. In 2018, she starred in the comedy film I Feel Pretty and garnered a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination for her Broadway debut in Meteor Shower.
Early life and background
Schumer was born on June 1, 1981, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, New York, to Sandra Jane (née Jones) and Gordon David Schumer, who owned a baby-furniture company. Schumer's father was born to a Jewish family from Ukraine. She is a second cousin of U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Her mother, who is from a Protestant background and has deep New England roots, converted to Judaism before her marriage. Schumer was raised Jewish and says she had to deal with antisemitism as a child. Her mother's ancestry included Puritans in the 17th-century English colony of Massachusetts. As a guest on Finding Your Roots in 2017, Schumer learned that in 1704, three children from her ancestor Thomas Tarbell's family were captured at Groton, Massachusetts, in a French-Abenaki raid and taken to Montreal. The girl was ransomed by a French-Canadian family and ultimately joined a French Catholic convent; the two boys were each adopted by Mohawk families at Kahnawake and became thoroughly assimilated. They married Mohawk women and some of their descendants became chiefs. There are still Mohawk by the surname Tarbell in Kahnawake and Akwesasne, another village reserve on the St. Lawrence River founded by the brothers.
Through the success of her father's furniture company in Manhattan, Schumer's household was wealthy during her early years. When she was nine years old, her father's business failed and he went bankrupt, and either then or when she was 12 (sources differ), her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Some time afterward, her parents divorced. Moving to Long Island with her mother, Schumer lived in Rockville Centre, New York, and attended South Side High School. She was voted both "Class Clown" and "Teacher's Worst Nightmare" upon graduation in 1999. She attended the Hebrew school of the Central Synagogue of Nassau County, a Reform synagogue in Rockville Centre, on whose board her mother served. Schumer moved near Baltimore, Maryland, after high school when she attended Towson University; she graduated with a degree in theater in 2003. She returned to New York City after college, where she studied at the William Esper Studio for two years and worked as a bartender and a waitress. She also for a period relocated to Santa Barbara, California (with a boyfriend she characterized as abusive), where she worked as a pedicab driver. She has a younger sister, Kim Caramele, who is a comedy writer and a producer, and a half-brother, Jason Stein, who is a musician in Chicago, Illinois.
