Comedy review: Amy Schumer, Edinburgh Playhouse

Amy Schumer used candour to gain laughs. Picture: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Kicking off her UK tour, the first since her film Trainwreck made her one of the most bankable and high-profile comedians on the planet, Amy Schumer suggests she’s in the honeymoon period of her celebrity.

Such is her lack of filter, openly revealing explicit details of her sexual, drinking and pranking escapades, that she’s anticipating a fall from grace soon.

The American is certainly upfront about her routine blackouts and can match swaggering male comics for the expressiveness of her bedroom talk, graphically miming scrubbing her vagina with a furious motion. But there’s more nuance and compelling candour in the awkwardness she describes directly after sex; a winningly blunt assessment of the boyfriends she’s stolen from their mothers; and a feminist agenda that finds her railing against the women’s magazines and film critics who would categorise her as an “alternative” romantic lead, mocking her paparazzi shots and the judgemental stories spun from them.

She obviously feels obliged to address the absurdities of US gun culture, after two young women were shot dead at a screening of Trainwreck last year – not a difficult satirical target, but necessary, perhaps. Similarly, she feels she needs to apologise for Donald Trump. But this is more of a setup for her to reveal the awkward smalltalk she shared with Hillary Clinton at a birthday party, such rarefied gatherings being occasions when her mischievous, everywoman side shines through. Forthright and bracingly assured, even as she shows her vulnerabilities, bet on Schumer being around for a while yet.