Amy Schumer is not afraid in 'Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo'

As you might expect if you've seen her Comedy Central show, her HBO stand-up special or her hit movie Trainwreck, there are one or two R-rated jokes in Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, the first book by comedian Amy Schumer.

Inside the essay collection (out on Tuesday), you'll be treated to some fairly explicit and frankly hilarious tales. They star bodily fluids (the time she got enormously sick on crab cakes and had to make the Sophie's Choice about which end to hover over the toilet) and body parts (the celebrity hockey player who was just too well proportioned for his night with her to end happily).

But as with fellow gross-out comedian Seth Rogen (see Sausage Party), Schumer just can't help keep her brain from poking out among the food, the fluids and the sex. She's a genuine big-time introvert, we learn. She meditates twice a day. She both contradicts her image and embraces it. She is large, she contains multitudes, and she loves to mix Walt Whitman quotes with queef jokes.

It's more clear in this book than it is in Inside Amy Schumer: The raw intelligence is strong with this one, no matter how much she tries to hide it behind her self-deprecating, sullen conversational style.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

This is at heart a collection of honest-to-goodness motherfreakin' essays, people -- remember those? Essays are attempts, literally; attempts to say something new and important, where no one faults you even when you fall flat on your ass, because you tried and you amused us.

It's this willingness to fail and be fragile in the service of saying something important as much as the self-skewering asides or shocking stories, goddammit, that makes Schumer excellent company. "I look at the saddest things in life and laugh at how awful they are, because they are hilarious and it’s all we can do with moments that are painful," she writes.

The defining characteristic of Amy Schumer is akin to that of Lenny Bruce. She is not afraid.

Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo is different from the big comedian autobiographies we've been pummeled with in recent years, from Steve Martin's Born Standing Up to Amy Poehler's Yes Please and Tina Fey's Bossypants. All very good, funny books, yes, but they hewed to the same autobiographical structure. Shouldn't a good comedian try blowing that safe structure to smithereens?

There are certainly chunks of pure autobiography here, mostly found in tender and funny essays about her parents that read like a kind of millennial David Sedaris. There's a raft of goofy family photos. There's the obligatory how-I-made-it-in-comedy narrative, but it's confined to a single essay. (Spoiler alert: keep trying! Fail! Do it all the time!)

Otherwise, the recollections appear at the service of important points. When you start reading the essay "How I Lost My Virginity," you expect a charming, possibly gross, possibly salacious but certainly uproarious tale. By the end, you're confronting something different altogether: the alarming number of women whose first time was stolen forever by a pathetic boy who hasn't been taught the meaning of sexual assault.

Schumer's talent is to make the not-okay stuff that women face all the time seem mundane, and hence more universal. On that note, the job of "The Worst Night of My Life" is not to tell a jaw-dropping tale about the time Amy tried to break up with a boyfriend and he got really, scary mad. It's to show how common abusive relationships can be amd that you're not exempt from them if you consider yourself, like Schumer, "a strong-ass woman."

Here she is defending her right to write an essay on gun control like a champ:

I know that for many of you, this might not be a chapter you signed up for and you may be thinking, Get back to telling your vagina jokes! Make us laugh, clown! I hear you ...

But when an injustice affects me deeply, I will speak about it— and I suggest you do the same. I wish I could muster the energy to put a clever and sarcastic spin on some of the grave statistics about gun violence in America, but I have to tell you, I just fucking can’t ...

They are wrong to say that I’m out of my league. Because I do know this issue. And you do too. Anyone who lives and breathes and has an opinion about whether or not first graders should get shot at school is qualified to speak on this issue.

Amy Schumer succeeded because she spoke up; because she got up to the mic again and again in front of tiny audiences, tried jokes, failed, tried again. The book is similar. Not all the essays succeed, but they are full of heart, and they offer useful perspectives. We learn through the messy things in life, not by avoiding them.

That's also the lesson of the final essay, the one that explains the title of the book and makes it more than just funny:

Fuck yes, I regret getting this ugly tattoo that I thought signified toughness when it really just symbolized how lost and powerless I was when I was an eighteen-year-old girl ... Ironically, the tattoo represents the opposite for me today. It reminds me that it’s important to let yourself be vulnerable, to lose control and make a mistake ...

Beautiful, ugly, funny, boring, smart or not, my vulnerability is my ultimate strength. There’s nothing anyone can say about me that’s more permanent, damaging, or hideous than the statement I have forever tattooed upon myself. I’m proud of this ability to laugh at myself— even if everyone can see my tears, just like they can see my dumb, senseless, wack, lame lower back tattoo.

Mic drop.