Amy Schumer Says Bad Reviews for ‘Kinda Pregnant’ Are Just for Clicks
The Kinda Pregnant reviews are in and they’re kinda bad — Rotten Tomatoes has a 22 percent critics’ rating for Amy Schumer’s new Netflix comedy. The comedian is taking the pans personally. “It gets more clicks to trash someone, especially me,” she said in a recent Instagram post.
Schumer gave a shoutout to critic Owen Glieberman for “the bravery to say you like something” after his mostly positive review in Variety. That separates Glieberman from those who “don’t like physical comedy or you are a single guy who prefers sci-fi or sometimes the assignment is to trash something.”
Cracked must not be interested in clicks, based on our positive review of Schumer’s new comedy. But I’m not sure how to break this to the comic — there’s no internet fortune to be made in saying a movie is so-so. When Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times says Kinda Pregnant is “filled with dopey men and despairing women” or rogerebert.com’s Christy Lemire writes, “Pretty much everyone in this movie is annoying all the time,” neither site experienced a massive surge in online traffic.
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Based on Schumer’s premise, every movie or show on Rotten Tomatoes would earn a rotten rating to generate those ka-ching clicks. How then to explain Schumer’s Trainwreck, applauded by critics (84 percent positive reviews) and audiences alike? That was before the internet turned on Schumer? Her latest stand-up special Emergency Contact, just over a year old, has a 100 percent positive critics’ rating.
I’m on board with the idea that Schumer gets more than her fair share of cruel treatment on the internet. People were trashing Kinda Pregnant on Netflix’s Twitter account before anyone had even seen the movie. Much of the scorn is unprovoked, proving the age-old online adage that “people suck.” But Schumer invites some of the backlash with provocative, questionable social media posts like this one.
The sad truth for Schumer: The vast majority of movie critics don’t think about the comic one way or another. If they find her new comedy special is funny, they’ll say so. If she delivers a shrill performance in Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, they’ll call it like they see it. There’s nothing brave nor greedy about either stance — they’re just opinions.
I checked Netflix’s Top 10 Movies this morning and there was Kinda Pregnant, sitting pretty at #1. Maybe mixed reviews and online controversy aren’t so bad when it comes to generating the kind of clicks that count the most — Netflix viewers choosing which comedy they want to watch next.
