A new celebrity coupling is on everyone’s lips this week, eliciting squeals of excitement, an endless array of photos, and gossipy speculation about how this blessed union originated.
No, it’s not Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux, nor Kylie Jenner and Tyga. Neither of these tabloid-magnet pairings holds a candle to the latest “it” couple: Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence.
The Oscar-winning actress and the Comedy Central maven may just be the most adored couple of the summer.
The pair nearly broke the internet when video of the two rocking out at a Billy Joel concert at Wrigley Field in Chicago surfaced. Schumer and Lawrence jammed out barefoot to “Uptown Girl” on the Piano Man’s piano.
Sure, it could be seen as a self-promoting wink to the final scene to the same song in Schumer’s Trainwreck. Yet, she and Lawrence are so completely charming together, that we let it slide as we swooned.
The video went viral days after Lawrence told the New York Times that she and Schumer had almost finished writing a screenplay in which the two play sisters.
“Amy and I were creatively made for each other,” Lawrence said of their project. Based on the joyous shouts from the web at hearing their new venture, a whole lot of people agree with her assessment that they are the perfect pair.
“Our dreams are officially coming true” E! declared—and they typically only get that excited when a Kardashian offers an exclusive quote about the weather.
The only thing missing from our love affair with this celebrity twosome is a cute, gimmicky nickname —and the Daily Beast is henceforth throwing Schu-Law into the ring.
In a summer of Hollywood breakups, we’ve found a new couple to moon over that has all the star-power of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner at their best, but with even more humor, charm, and style.
While celebrity buddies are not a new phenomenon, these friendships, and especially female ones, have reached new heights in terms of the media salivation they elicit.
Lawrence and Schumer are not the only pairing. Before she was slated for being antagonistic, we lapped up Taylor Swift’s friendships with Lena Dunham, or anyone else from T-Swift’s coterie of millennial galpals who can put with her harness-wearing ways.
While we still love spying on Hollywood couples vacationing in Ibiza, we prefer pictures of celebrity sisters in arms having the ultimate girls-only getaways.
Chelsea Handler and Jennifer Aniston earned nearly as much attention from the paps when they vacationed together in Los Cabos in 2010 as when the latter left for her honeymoon with Theroux earlier this month.
This summer, we’ve enviously eyed Schumer and Lawrence’s vacation in Montauk.
We’ve relished Instagram photos of the two sharing a water ski with Schumer clutching Lawrence as The Hunger Games star looks totally BAMF driving. They also posted photos of themselves lounging on rafts with several other lady friends, having the time of their lives with nary a penis-possessor in sight.
From the tabloid lens to our own voyeuristic desires, our passions for fawning over female friendships is a significant departure in our celebrity culture, and it speaks to larger social trends, even outside of Tinseltown.
“What we’re seeing now in terms of celebrity female couples getting media attention is part of an overall trend in which girlfriends have become incredibly important,” said Marilyn Yalom, Stanford scholar and co-author of The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, which will be published in September.
While Yalom said there “have been incidences of famous female friendships in the political arena, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton [leading 19th Century suffragettes],” there has been “nothing at all similar” to what we see today with the status given to Lawrence and Schumer.
Yalom said that there has been more focus on female friendships over the past 30 to 40 years, with “even more so in the last five years.”
The reasons for this change are unsurprising when considering the demographic shifts in marital patterns.
“As women have married later or not married at all or increasingly become single parents or gotten divorced, women are spending more time outside heterosexual couples,” Yalom explained.
“That’s given a space for female friends, as well as provided the need for their support. It’s not surprising to see the importance of celebrity couples who are women and that they have gotten public attention.”
Celebrity women may also be gaining more attention than their make counterparts for their friendships because they tend to be more physically expressive.
“If there’s no affection, it’s not a true friendship. In women, it tends to be very physical and much more sensual than in men. They’re allowed to hug and kiss each other,” said Yalom.
Schumer and Lawrence are the epitome of this sentiment, with Lawrence literally kissing Schumer’s feet at the Billy Joel concert and the two clutching each other’s hands.
The visibility of famous female BFFs sends its own message that reverberates beyond the sphere of tabloid gossip.
“Think of countries where women are not allowed female friends, where they’re not allowed out of the choice and allowed to have friends of their choices,” said Yalom. “I see the kinds of freedom American and Western women have to be a form of empowerment.”
All too true—and yes, very important and worthy. Now, how do we score an invite to Schu-Law’s next yacht party?