Inside Amy Schumer's Road to Having a Completely Secret Wedding

Why the I Feel Pretty star went entirely under the radar with Chris Fischer, her new husband

By Natalie Finn Feb 15, 2018 8:31 PMTags

Alright, Amy Schumer, if that's how you want to play it.

The comedian and actress, who confirmed only four days ago by way of a PDA pic that she was dating Chris Fischer, just up and married him on Tuesday.

Well, obviously some planning went into it. They had to rent the private estate in Malibu where the ceremony took place, and they had to get the invitations out to Jennifer Lawrence and other assorted guests. There were even matching bridesmaid dresses, so we're wondering if there's photographic evidence floating about of a thoroughly debauched bachelorette party.

Though that's the ribald image Schumer, who knows her way around a joke about getting wasted and who played a commitment-fearing career gal with a mess of a personal life in Trainwreckwants you to have of her. (And considering they had an ice sculpture of a naked man at the reception, it's not entirely off the mark.)

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Amy Schumer and Chris Fischer Wedding Photos
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But Amy Schumer just may be a bit of a romantic.

She even shared wedding photos with the caption "yup" by way of confirmation. (She also stated, for the record, that she isn't pregnant and asked that in lieu of wedding gifts fans make a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety.)

Either way, she cared enough about keeping her big day to herself to not even let on that she was engaged. And it's not like she's been hiding—she taped Ellen just last week (and if she had worn a ring she wouldn't have stood a chance against Ellen DeGeneres' need to know). Her reluctance to share more excitement about finding love again prior to saying "I do" was a lingering effect from her breakup with Ben Hanisch less than a year ago. During their two-year relationship we learned that the comic who'd made an art of self-deprecation and acerbic observations on dating culture and the ways men see women (and how women see each other) did enjoy romance and being a part of a couple.

Like... lots of people.

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Secret Celebrity Weddings

"We're in love," Schumer said in the July 2016 issue of Vogue. "And we're still in a total honeymoon phase. It's a real relationship. Who knows what will happen, but we're real good right now."

But to Marie Claire she admitted to having a little more anxiety about the whole thing. "Being in love is the scariest thing in the world," she said. "You want to f--king cry and scream. I can't handle it. Every time we say good-bye, I think, 'This will have been a nice last week together.' Or I tell myself nothing is real and he's going to leave me and tell me he never loved me. I feel so bad for him. How exhausting it must be dating me."

She had admitted approaching dating and love with skepticism, and over the years she's shared more about her formative years that contributed to her reservations. She dotes on her dad, who's been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, though she'd be the last to call him the perfect father.

Schumer, who's super close to her younger sister Kim (who was a bridesmaid of course), told Vogue that they had some rosy memories, "But we didn't realize that he was a flagrant alcoholic. I have a joke about it in Trainwreck where I say, 'He once apologized to me for missing a volleyball game that he was at.' He'd drive us home and not remember the next day. So our mom dealt with that whole insane thing. He'd never admit to cheating on her, but we can only imagine."

But "I was funny before the bad stuff started happening," she added.

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Amy Schumer's Famous Fans

And in her book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, Schumer revealed that her mother cheated on her father (with the father of Amy's best friend) after he was diagnosed with MS, and her relationship with her mom hadn't recovered from that. She came home one day to find her mom crying and, as a teacher of deaf students, she chose to tell Schumer in sign language that she was leaving her father because she'd fallen in love with someone else.

"We love each other and I'm really grateful to her and for her, but we'll never be how we were," Schumer told USA Today. "I wrote that family is a constant negotiation so it's constantly evolving, but we'll never be close again."

For the rest of 2016 it was all just "Amy, Amy, Amy" as what for all intents and purposes was the final season of Inside Amy Schumer played out on Comedy Central, she got to making Snatched with Goldie Hawn, and she enjoyed (and apparently marveled over) being with Hanisch, a furniture designer she'd met on Raya, a dating site for celebrities and/or creative types. 

The pair marked their first anniversary on Nov. 19, 2016, with Schumer taking the more humorous route and Hanisch penning her an entirely mushy message.

"A year ago I met the love of my life," he wrote on Instagram. "We both weren't looking for a relationship at the time, but something felt right from the very first night we met. We ended up spending 6 days in a row together. This pic was taken in New Orleans and was the night I knew I wanted to spend my life with her."

By then, the couple were regularly batting away both engagement and breakup rumors 'cause, well, you can't please everybody.

In early May, on The Howard Stern show, Schumer was asked if she and Hanisch were talking about getting married.

"We're talking about today," she said. "I love the idea of committing to somebody and making that choice. I want to have a family, I think, and everything. But right now, we're not in talks."

Two weeks later, they confirmed they had ended their relationship. (But in a sign of the okay-ness of it all, neither went through and wiped their Instagram accounts clear of memories.)

Schumer kept pretty quiet about it, but she cracked a few jokes, fittingly, at the Hilarity for Charity Variety Show in New York that June. "I went through a breakup about a month ago. We were a year and a half, you know, it's not that bad," she told the audience. "We went out with a couple who had been together a long time, we were trying to rush the intimacy. Like, I was trying to impress the girl and I was like, 'Well he woke me up this morning with a fart!' And he just slowly turned to me and he goes, 'We doing this?'

"And I was like 'No, no, no, no, we're not opening fire. Don't tell me any of the disgusting s--t I've done.'"

Snatched had a lackluster reception, so Schumer took the opportunity to lie low for awhile. Then it was back to work, shooting her latest film, I Feel Pretty, which hits theaters April 27 (and is already getting backlash from people from the Internet who refuse to accept the "all that matters is how you feel about yourself inside" message and roll with it without a fight). She also made her Broadway debut in Steve Martin's Meteor Shower.

Then at some point, she met Fischer, a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, chef and farmer who got his start as a sous chef at Mario Batali's famed Babbo in New York (where he got the job after pal Jake Gyllenhaal—another wedding guest—introduced him to Batali). Then he was the chef at Beach Plum Inn on Martha's Vineyard, a favorite date night spot for the Obamas when they were in town.

As for that farmer part, Fischer is a grandson of the founders of Beetlebung Farm on Martha's Vineyard, which he still counts as his home base. He opened a produce market there last June and told Boston magazine he was hoping to purchase his family's land once his father and dad's siblings inherit it from his 102-year-old grandfather.

He humbly described himself as usually being "dead broke," but he's the one funding his various culinary ventures, including his farm-to-table restaurant Beetlebung. "After years of working for other people, my intuition is, 'I'm doing this on my own terms,'" Fischer said.

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And then he met Amy Schumer (who in 2016 bought back the farm her father lost to bankruptcy after he got sick, and where she apparently spent quality time growing up). They went Instagram-official earlier this week with a photo of them sharing a kiss at Ellen DeGeneres' 60th birthday party, and now they are married.

They exchanged personal vows and, per Jewish tradition, Fischer broke a napkin-wrapped glass at the end of the ceremony, and Gordon Schumer got to see his firstborn daughter get married. We're going to bet that, with this crowd, there were some toasts to remember, too.

But however quickly this courtship unfolded, perhaps no one was more surprised by the success of it all than the bride.

At the end of 2015, talking to Barbara Walters, Schumer—perhaps because she believed it, perhaps because she didn't want to jinx herself—told Barbara Walters she didn't think she'd ever get married or have a family.

"I would love those things, but I don't really see it for myself," she said. "I hope that happens, but I don't know how realistic it is."

Why shoot for realism when you can have the fairy tale?