Amy Beth Schumer is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actress, and producer. She is the creator, co-producer, co-writer and star of the sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, which has been airing on Comedy Central since 2013. Inside Amy Schumer has received a Peabody Award and Schumer has been nominated for five Primetime Emmy Awards for her work on the series, winning for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series in 2015. She wrote and starred in the comedy, Trainwreck (2015), for which she received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.
Schumer was born on June 1, 1981 in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York, to Sandra (née Jones) and Gordon Schumer, who owned a baby furniture company. She has a younger sister, Kimberly, who is a comedy writer and a producer, and a brother, Jason Stein, who is a musician in Chicago, Illinois. Her father is second cousin to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. Schumer's father is Jewish and her mother is from a Protestant background. Schumer was raised Jewish.
Through the success of her father's furniture company in Manhattan, Schumer began life in a wealthy family. But at age nine, her family went bankrupt, and her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; her parents divorced three years later. Moving to Long Island, she attended South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York and was voted both "Class Clown" and "Teacher's Worst Nightmare" upon graduation in 1999. Schumer moved to Baltimore, Maryland after high school where she attended Towson University, graduating with a degree in theater in 2003. She returned to New York City after college, where she studied at the William Esper Studio for two years and worked as a bartender and a waitress.