Kinda pregnant, kinda not
dir: Tyler Spindel
2025
It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.
This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.
This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”
Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.
Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?
Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?
I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.
I don’t mind, I mean, I don’t like it, but I’m no-one to tell her what characters she should play or how she should play them. To kind of fill in the gaps left by a character that doesn’t really have that much to do or say beyond pretending to be pregnant, and thus falling over, getting her fake belly stabbed or set on fire, in ways that are meant to be mildly shocking, the film employs Urzila Carlson to be ‘that friend’ who is louder, constantly vaping, more obnoxious and more chaotic in order to make the main character not seem so much of an arsehole.
Now, Urzila is who she is, and if you’re a fan of her stand-up specials or her many appearances on Australian television through the various international comedy festivals and demented shows like Taskmaster, then having her here is a treat. I think she’s great, but even to me there are still plenty of scenes here where you can just feel that they thought endless flailing would somehow work out in the edit. I love swearing, really deeply love and need it, but even to me having her puff on her vape and call multiple characters fucking this or fucking that in her delightful Afrikaner / Kiwi accent was a bit much, even for an open-minded cosmopolitan sophisticate and aesthete like me.
I’m not the biggest fan of Will Forte, seeing as watching season after season of him behaving terribly in Last Man on Earth made me loathe the character he played so much that some of that spilled over onto my perception of the man, but if this film achieves anything, it’s that it takes this very strange individual but makes him probably the sanest, most normal character in the whole film.
And despite implying that he’s a loser because, post-breakup, he’s living in his sister’s basement, come on, people, he’s the Zamboni driver for the ice skating rink at Central Park: that would hands down by one of the coolest jobs in the world! I imagine it’s probably not a living wage, it being in America and all, but it would be such fun, at least some of the time.
The idea that pregnant women are annoying or irritating or needy or self-centred is not a particularly original or interesting idea, but it also doesn’t seem to be fertile ground for comedy, or drama, in this instance, in this movie. Many of the female characters, mostly pregnant but even those like the main character Lainey who aren’t, are disappointed in their male partners. Lainey, expecting she’s going to be proposed to by her partner at the time, an assumption so overused in these kinds of flicks that you’d think the true villain is delusional expectations rather than the inability for cis het men to commit / keep their partners happy / actually listen to their partners or see them as fully human, which is in itself a separate problem. But Lainey’s best friend Kate feels unloved and unsupported by her partner, and the new friend Megan she makes, also pregnant, also has a partner who is completely checked out and didn’t support her in her first pregnancy, leaving her dreading what might happen post partum with her second.
And because this isn’t a movie that cares about any of that stuff, it hand waves away any of the concerns those women have in favour of them eventually existing solely to reassure Lainey that she’s still awesome even if she lied terribly to a number of people.
But that’s not the lens that I solely chose to watch this movie through. I was entertained. I smiled a few times, and I had a bunch of laughs. The sex scene in the basement / garage turned out to be far funnier than I thought it had any right to be, escalating in crazy ways even if its basis was implausible. Urzila’s character’s abject disdain for and verbal abuse of the school’s students also often made me laugh uncontrollably.
And strangely enough (for me), that there are actual scenes of Lainey reciting the poetry of Anne Sexton, and they work, because at least for a few moments we’re not supposed to be seeing Lainey as a joke, or as a bundle of self-hatred and such. Schumer excels at balancing the bits about womanhood and now motherhood that many other actors and comedians shy away from, the difficult, the embarrassing, the goofy and the deeply felt, and there were at least for me enough moments that treated her character like an actual person and not just as the butt of every joke.
I just thought of the other gag I loved, to which there such a great callback later on in the flick: when Lainey is on the subway, and a mother and her teenage daughter stare at her intently and shower her with compliments. Of course when the teenager says out loud that, inspired by Lainey’s glowing radiance, she is going to get pregnant too, the mother’s expression turns abruptly to hate and she silently mouths “FUCK YOU” at Lainey for her troubles.
Damn, I laughed so much at that, and even more so when she bumps into them again later on.
It’s not the greatest, as in it’s not Bad Moms, but it’s okay. Looking forward to the sequel when everyone gets pregnant again (or maybe they don’t?) though, possibly there will be the additional storyline about Hollywood actors using IVF and surrogates and the ethics thereof to contend with. I’m sure they’ll improvise a lot of gags out of that subject material.
6 times Kinda Pregnant was kinda okay out of 10
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“Can you two bitches calm down you can’t even come up with proper fucking swear words at this point.” – Urzila has spoken - Kinda Pregnant
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