Thursday, October 11, 2007 10:34 AM CDT

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The joke's on the teacher

By Dan Craft
dcraft@pantagraph.com

Amy Schumer, the only she on the he-heavy "Last Comic Standing Live Tour," was voted "Teacher's Worst Nightmare" in high school.

True or false?

"Oh, true. Very true," the 26-year-old Long Island native matter-of-factly confesses. "I never let the fact that I could get in trouble get in the way of thinking of the funniest thing I could say or do in class, like raising my hand and asking a ridiculous question."

Anything, she adds, "to be entertaining."

But as every class clown has learned the hard way, one person's entertainment can be another person's -- usually a teacher's -- nightmare.

The classroom setting probably made sense: It was her schooling ground for the fast comebacks and jokes that helped her rise to the finalist stage of this season's edition -- No. 5 -- of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" reality series (the one in which viewers vote for the winner).

Not a lot will have changed when Schumer takes to the stage of Bloomington's U.S. Cellular Coliseum at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, along with "Last Comic Standing" grand champ Jon Reep and fellow finalists Lavell Crawford, Doug Benson, Gerry Dee and Ralph Harris.

She'll still be playing class cut-up, only a bigger scale.

"Sometimes it was a great thing," Schumer recalls of her "teacher's worst nightmare" days. "But usually it was a bad thing."

In her own defense, she notes that "in the classes I was really interested in and loved, the teachers were shocked when I got that award -- they thought it was a mistake."

As for the teachers from the classes she wasn't interested in and didn't love?

Not a mistake.

Fully earned, in fact.

Her modus operandi: "Belittling myself in front of the classroom."

That way, she says, the teacher couldn't really take justifiable personal offense. But Schumer still earned her yucks from her captive audience of classmates.

She says the belittling strategy hails from her own longstanding family tradition of mining humor from tragedy.

The defining moment in this area came between the ages of 12 and 14. That was the stretch of her life when the floor fell out from under the Schumer family.

"We were really wealthy and living in Manhattan," she says, "and then my father went bankrupt."

That left the Schumer clan broke and no longer living in Manhattan. "It taught us to stick together and gave us the ability to laugh at ourselves and our problems."

Unlike her five relatively veteran male counterparts on the "Last Comic Standing Live Tour," Schumer has been at the comedy game now for only three years.

She's the baby on the tour bus, and freely admits it.

"I've been very aware of my inexperience in comparison," she says. At the same time, she adds, she isn't pumping the vets for pointers.

Instead, "I have to learn for myself," Schumer says. "Every time I go on stage, I learn a new lesson, whether it's how to deal with a heckler or how do I respond when a joke doesn't get a laugh."

No one can teach you about that.

Schumer also fesses up that she was not a regular, or even semi-regular, "Last Comic Standing" viewer before she became a part of the series as a contestant.

"Comedians are out at night doing shows during prime time, so we aren't able to watch shows like that. And I haven't had cable for a long time now," she says, adding, "though I might be getting it back now." (Note: NBC upped the prize money ante considerably for the fifth season, with the grand champ earning a cool quarter-million.)

Schumer's comedy heroines include Margaret Cho, Judy Gold, Ellen DeGeneres and Sarah Silverman (to whom she's been compared as "a cleaner version").

The fact that she's the only woman on the current live tour and that a woman has yet to be voted top winner on the show doesn't faze her.

"My only goal was to represent myself and my comedy accurately, and to be proud of what I did," she says. "That's true, no matter how corny it sounds."

And, yes, the former "Teacher's Worst Nightmare" said something "corny."

The teachers who knew that nightmare first-hand must be wondering where they went wrong.

At a glance

What: Last Comic Standing Live Tour

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: U.S. Cellular Coliseum, 101 S. Madison St., Bloomington

Tickets: $15 to $35

Box office number: (866) 891-9992

Still standing

In addition to finalist Amy Schumer, the "Last Comic Standing Live Tour" features the fifth season's grand champ and four of her fellow finalists. They are:

Winner

• Jon Reep: A regular on ABC's "Rodney"; recently filmed his own "Comedy Central Presents" half-hour special; star of the famed Dodge Hemi commercial (as the redneck who twangs "That thing gotta Hemi?")

First runner-up

• Lavell Crawford: Credits include HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, "Jamie Foxx's Laffapalooza," "Showtime at the Apollo," "BET's Comic View"

The rest

• Doug Benson: Creator-writer-star of the play "The Marijuana-Logues"; regular on VH-1's "Best Week Ever"; recurring guest on "Jimmy Kimmel Live"

• Gerry Dee: Former collegiate hockey player; played Boston Bruin great Wayne Cashman in Canadian miniseries, "Canada Russia 72"; winner of "Toronto's Funniest Comic with a Day Job"; appeared on CBS' "Star Search" and NBC's "The Late, Late Show"

• Ralph Harris: Appeared in the recent movie hits "Dreamgirls" and "Evan Almighty"; starred in the ABC sitcom, "One of Our Own"; filmed his own "Comedy Central Presents" special; opened for Janet Jackson's sold-out "Rhythm Nation" tour

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Fourth-place finisher and lone female finalist Amy Schumer is part of the "Last Comic Standing Live Tour," coming to the U.S. Cellular Coliseum in Bloomington at 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

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