Amy Schumer has said that she ran her jokes about Will Smith past him before this year’s Oscars.

The comedian, who co-hosted the event with Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, has now explained that she double-checked the people she was poking fun at could approve of her jokes ahead of time.

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“I did reach out to people I was going to joke about before and make sure it was OK with them because I’ve been burned too many times,” Schumer said in an interview on SiriuxXM’s The Howard Stern Show (per The Independent), adding that she “didn’t want the camera to cut to somebody looking sad”.

She added “I told the Williams sisters, I told Will, I told Leo,” of the jokes she made about Serena and Venus Williams, Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio.

On stage, Schumer discussed Smith’s film King Richard, which tells the story of Serena and Venus Williams’ father Richard, saying: “After years of Hollywood ignoring women’s stories, this year we finally got a movie about the incredible Williams sisters’ dad.”

Amy Schumer recently revealed she received death threats after a joke she made about Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons at the Oscars.

Schumer had pretended to mistake Kirsten Dunst, nominated for her performance in The Power in the Dog, for a seat-filler, who is a person hired to sit in a guest’s chair if they briefly leave the room.

Fans of Dunst and her husband Jesse Plemons, who engaged with Schumer after the joke, took aim at Schumer on social media. She then said in a statement on Twitter: “Hey I appreciate the love for Kirsten Dunst. I love her, too! Wouldn’t disrespect that queen like that.”

The comedian has since explained that the statement was necessary as the abuse she was receiving had begun to spiral.

“They were so bad the secret service reached out to me,” Schumer told Stern. “I was like, ‘I think you have the wrong number. It’s Amy, not Will [Smith].’ The misogyny is unbelievable.”