Suffering From Amy Schumer Overload? Let’s Talk About The Hilarious And Underrated Anna Faris Instead

Amy Schumer’s sure been getting a lot of press, hasn’t she? You’d think there’d never been any other bawdy blonde lady comedians. (Poor Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate, who’ve collectively had exquisite breasts, taught kids a lesson and led a restaurant sing-along about penis size.)

I want to give Anna Faris her dues. She’s lampooned slut-shaming, reclaimed the airhead archetype, shown that stoner humour isn’t just for dudes, and even pulled off a daring rape joke. Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz called her “the most talented comic actress of her generation – Jim Carrey in the body of a sixties surfer girl”.

Now she’s earning more critical praise for playing a recovering alcoholic in female-centric sitcom Mom, which co-stars the equally hilarious Allison Janney. Also, Anna Faris is married to raptor-taming dreamboat Chris Pratt.

The trouble is, Faris doesn’t come across as cool. She doesn’t have a stand-up or improv background. She’s spent most of her career as a second banana in films that have earned, to put it kindly, ‘mixed reviews’. And her career has been bookended with mainstream projects that lack indie cred.

Let’s talk about what makes her worth talking about.

Let’s Talk About That Face

Amy Schumer has a cynical-looking face. A knowing, world-weary, rarely surprised face. It’s a John Lennon face. A Bill Murray face.

Anna Faris, on the other hand, has a Paul McCartney face. A Dan Aykroyd face. We read her as facile because she doesn’t perform intelligence as suspicion. Her shtick is that she isn’t in on the joke.

From the time she was recruited as paradigmatic horror ingénue Cindy in Scary Movie, Faris has spent her career playing to – and undermining – the bimbo stereotype suggested by her doll’s face and enormous eyes. AV Club critic Noel Murray says of Mom: “the humor pops because of the way Faris delivers her lines with wide, anxious eyes, looking like a silent-movie heroine.”

“I couldn’t even look at her when she was preparing her disgusted ‘I just ate something bad’ face, or her ‘I’m going to throw up all over you’ face, because I’d start laughing so hard I couldn’t act,” her Observe and Report co-star Seth Rogen told The New Yorker.

What makes Faris so effective in the Scary Movie films is the way she looks completely earnest during all the moronic scenarios Cindy endures. When she’s required to look afraid, she really seems scared. When she’s talking to a Japanese child ghost in awkwardly racist cod-Japanese, you get the sense she believes it’s real Japanese. And she even manages to sell a completely ridiculous scene from Scary Movie 2 in which she fights a puppet cat, shouting, “Help! My pussy’s gone crazy!”

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Let’s Talk About That Voice

You purr Faris’s first name: ‘Ahhh-na’. Saturday Night Live’s Abby Elliott used to do a vocal impression of her that highlights Faris’s drawn-out phrasing, which swoops breathily from a girlish high pitch to a throaty lower register.

But Elliott’s version is a caricature of the real thing. It’s meaner and more limited than the playful uses to which Faris puts female vocal clichés.

You can see the difference when Faris hosted SNL and began to exaggerate her own voice as Elliott stormed the stage, dressed as ‘Hanna Garis’.

In Lost in Translation, Faris is pitch-perfect as Kelly, a ditzy actress promoting an action movie in Tokyo by explaining her love of “Boo-dism” and “kara-tay”. She comes across as obnoxiously oblivious, but she’s a deliberate foil to the quietly superior Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). And a recurring joke in The House Bunny is that Faris’s character, Shelley, remembers the names of people she’s just met by reciting them in a growly demon voice, with a perfectly straight face.

I adore The House Bunny, even though it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill sorority romcom. What saves it is the central conceit that Shelley (Faris) is an innocent abroad, in the vein of Elf or Mork and Mindy, despite her adult-industry past in the Playboy Mansion.

As well as Shelley’s wholesome use of the vocabulary of sexiness, some wonderful comedy springs from her increasingly desperate attempts to impress the bookish Oliver (Colin Hanks). It’s not just Faris’s expert Lucille Ball-esque clowning, but also her “Oh, thank god” when the waiter interrupts Shelley’s agonised attempt at intellectual banter, and the urgent way she growls, “Sweet balls!”

I laugh every time during the audition scene in Smiley Face, as hapless stoner actress Jane tries to impress a casting director played to deadpan perfection by Jane Lynch. But that’s not even the best scene in the film – I am LOLing right now at the inspired impromptu unionist speech Jane gives in a meat processing plant.

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Let’s Talk About That Feminism

“As the lead in romantic comedies, you have to make the women love you and the guys fall in love with you,” Faris said in 2011. “It forces your choices to be cutesy and safe, which is why women are always falling down rather than grabbing their tits and saying, ‘Fuck you, bitches!’”

Observe and Report is an aggressively unlikeable black comedy in which Faris plays vain, trashy shopgirl Brandi, who’s idolised by Seth Rogen’s lumpen mall cop Ronnie. Their one date, on which Brandi takes Ronnie’s bipolar medication thinking it’s a recreational drug, is the darkest, darkest romcom parody.

“I think I need a mint or something,” she moans, having just vomited. “My breath tastes like shit.”

“Brandi, I accept you for you,” whispers Ronnie, and kisses her as a rock ballad swells on the soundtrack, fondling the motorcycle helmet she’s still wearing.

Then comes the notorious sex scene, during which Ronnie realises Brandi is completely unresponsive – complete with spew on the pillow – only for her to slur, “Why are you stopping, motherfucker!”

Yes, it’s rape. And it’s in a film that’s completely self-aware, wielding its own awfulness as a weapon and daring its audience to laugh in complicity.

Faris’s much tamer 2011 studio romcom, What’s Your Number set out to combat slut-shaming before Amy Schumer was a trainwreck. Faris plays Ally, who’s afraid she’s slept with too many men to be someone they want to commit to. So she decides to check if any of her exes are now marriage material, ignoring her attraction to a neighbour, Colin (Chris Evans).

Despite some prime Faris moments – such as when she pretends to Simon (Martin Freeman) that she has an English accent – What’s Your Number? bombed, and was slammed for its conservative politics. At Slate, Dana Stevens railed that its “criminal misuse” of Faris “renders the proceedings not just annoying but actively depressing.”

But the film’s failure was also blamed on industry structures that don’t support women. Studio boss Amy Pascal had backed Faris – but under her leadership, Sony was floundering. At the time, Faris expressed her desire to create a girl gang of comic actresses whose collective star power could get their projects made. “I want my equivalent of the Judd Apatow crew,” she told Marie Claire. “You have to create your own stuff.”

And now she’s starring in a Chuck Lorre network sitcom. But while many people think of Lorre as the bro’s bro behind Big Bang Theory and Two And A Half Men, he was also a writer and executive producer on Roseanne, Cybill, Grace Under Fire and Mike and Molly. These are shows about women’s struggles: to parent their kids, to break through economic barriers, to overcome addictions and find their own happiness.

In Mom, Faris stars as Christy, a single mother of two, gambling addict and recovering alcoholic who’s reunited with her own irresponsible mother Bonnie (Janney) in an AA meeting. Over its two seasons, the show has wrung bittersweet jokes from addiction and relapse, homelessness, cancer, teen pregnancy, the blue-collar poverty trap, and even the death of Christy’s dad. And within the limits of network TV, it’s considerably bawdy about female bodies and sexuality.

For a traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked sitcom, Mom is striking for its frequency of bleak, emotionally fraught moments, when the studio audience falls silent, or gasps in sympathy rather than laughing. It’ll never be as cool as the cable comedies that get praised for their edginess. But perhaps, as she ages out of nymphet roles, Faris has finally found a fitting showcase for her talents.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.