Since her début as a comedian, in 2005, Schumer has spent most nights onstage. Illustration by Cari Vander Yacht

Amy Schumer is on tour just now, and if you’ve loved her on TV, as I have, I suggest you see her perform live. The show isn’t disappointing, but it isn’t great, either, and it took me more than a minute to figure out why. At first, I thought my feeling of letdown had something to do with the context in which I saw her—at the Verizon Center, in Washington, D.C. (She’ll be at Madison Square Garden, in New York, on October 18th.) It was the night before the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened its doors to the public, a few blocks away. Pussy jokes could fall flat in juxtaposition with such a grand occasion, but in this multicultural world we’re able to think about many narratives at once. Except I’m not so sure that Schumer wants to. Most of the stories she told the night I saw her had to do with her boyfriend (“I met my boyfriend and I thought I would make him wait. Until after dinner. Just kidding. We didn’t have dinner”) or her genitalia. (Schumer dedicated a chapter to her lady parts in her delightful book “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo.” In “An Open Letter to My Vagina,” she writes, “First of all, I’m sorry. Second of all, you’re welcome.”)

The stage was vast, and flanked by two monitors that displayed the thirty-five-year-old comedian’s every movement for the enormous but not overwhelming crowd. About ten minutes into her act, Schumer, blond, creamy-skinned, and wearing a formfitting black top, a blue skirt, and black heels, told the audience that her “pussy . . . smells like a small barnyard animal. Not a fucked-up llama but a goat at a small petting zoo. That’s on its best day. On its worst day, after a blackout—ISIS.” By putting herself down in the language of schoolboy misogyny, Schumer was doing what most female comedians have done since the Friars Club was forced to start admitting them, back in the late eighties: attack yourself before the guys attack you—or exclude you.

Like any successful performer, Schumer was especially jazzed when dishing out the jokes that she knew would work. (She’s a good girl who’s not especially turned on by risk, or by the idea of searching for her material in front of an audience.) Moments after dumping on herself, she made it clear that she wasn’t the one doing the dumping. “There’s all this marketing out there now to make it smell like a Christmas tree,” she said. “We’re raised with so much shame about it. Guys are not like that. They don’t cum in your mouth and ask if they taste O.K. ‘I’ve been drinking a lot of water.’ Men, we love your cum; we want to make snow angels in it.” And it was when Schumer expressed her world-weariness—or, more precisely, her male-weariness—that she began to sound like someone you might want to spend time with. In a way, Schumer’s pussy jokes were dick jokes, aimed at the men (real or internalized) who try to hold women back, or keep women out, by telling them that their collective pussy stinks.

Schumer’s act lasts an hour and twenty minutes, which gives you a lot of time to think about the limits of perversity, and how, at times, the comic has to circumnavigate her own intelligence in order to make the character “Amy Schumer,” self-described “trash from Long Island,” come to life.

Actually, Schumer was born rich. In “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo,” she writes about how she lived on the Upper East Side as a child. Back then, her father made a killing importing children’s furniture from Europe. But once he’d established the trend his competitors caught on, and his business collapsed. The family moved to Long Island, where they eventually found themselves in drastically reduced circumstances. Dad had multiple sclerosis, and he drank. (In the book, Schumer admits, touchingly, that to this day, whenever she smells liquor on a man, she wants to sidle up to him.) Schumer’s parents divorced.

Two years after she graduated from Towson University, in Maryland, Schumer watched a friend do standup at a comedy club and, she writes, “like every other asshole who goes to comedy clubs, I thought, I could do this.” She could and she has. Since her début as a comedian, in 2005, Schumer has spent most nights onstage (despite her need for solitude, which she discusses in another standout chapter in the book). About performing, she writes, “Standing up there, onstage, under the lights, and expressing something you think is funny or important (or both) and being met with laughter, applause, appreciation, and agreement is a feeling I can’t describe. I am a human being and I want to be loved, and some nights I just want to sit around watching movies with my family or my boyfriend. But mostly every night for the last thirteen years, I’ve wanted to get onstage.”

Like many people, I had my first exposure to Schumer’s down-to-earth effervescence not at a comedy club but on television. I caught her in a small part on “Girls,” and then in full force on her Comedy Central program, “Inside Amy Schumer,” in 2013. There, as in her fantastic 2015 HBO special, “Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo,” directed by Chris Rock (who constructs a narrative around Schumer’s uneasy embrace of movies), the camera allows for an intimacy that Schumer couldn’t achieve in the huge Verizon Center. This was made glaringly clear by the contrast between one of Schumer’s opening acts, the hilarious Rachel Feinstein, and the star herself. Whereas Schumer stood pretty much center stage throughout her performance, using her arms to make or illustrate a point, Feinstein, small, dark-haired, and energetic, knew how to traverse the space; she was rarely still. I found myself watching Schumer on the monitors, where the camera could pick up the nuances in her expression, as much as I watched her “live.” (Like many performers who have gone from the stage to the screen, Schumer has to re-learn how the stage works in order to compensate for our familiarity with her filmed image.)

We live in a world now where everyone is ethnic or different in some way. Feinstein connected with the audience over the absurdities of family and her Jewishness. To wit: “I gave my guy a lap dance but I sang in Yiddish. He was flaccid and weeping at the end.” Schumer’s act dragged because she dragged out familiar tropes about her form of difference—being a woman. While Feinstein took apart traditional women’s roles—she was especially good when talking about her mother—Schumer, for the most part, talked about herself, or herself in relation to men, which, in her comedy, is the same thing. Schumer’s humor takes the world that Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers laid out and updates it with contemporary slang and less self-disgust: guys may like their dicks and Schumer may like their dicks, too, but their dicks don’t equal her lady parts. She has a point, but it gets lost in her standup in a way that it doesn’t in her TV specials. (“Trainwreck,” the 2015 hit movie she wrote and starred in, errs on the side of equating a woman’s self-fulfillment with her ability to get a man, but I don’t blame her for that; Hollywood is men, and they rarely pay for anything that doesn’t reinforce that fact.)