Ilana Glazer knows that she will forever be known as the “freewheeling stoner” Ilana Wexler from her beloved Comedy Central series Broad City. But over the past few years she has fully embraced the role of mother—in her life, in her indie film Babes, and now on the stand-up stage in her upcoming Hulu special Human Magic.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Glazer opens up about channeling the joy and anxiety of parenthood into comedy and the pressure not to disappoint the Broad City superfans who want her to be her iconic character in real life. She also shares details about the episode of that show that she and Abbi Jacobson planned to shoot in Israel and why she’s “very glad” they decided not to go through with it at the last minute. And Glazer discusses the decision to walk away from Broad City, her thoughts on a possible reboot down the line, and why, after so much time spent trying to mobilize young voters, she ultimately wasn’t “surprised” by the 2024 election results.
“A lot has happened in my life since my last special,” Glazer says at the top of our conversation this week. “A lot has happened in life since my last special.”
The comedian, who recently came out as non-binary and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, taped her first stand-up special, The Planet Is Burning, in 2019—the same year she and Jacobson ended Broad City after five seasons. “Since then, COVID hit, I had a baby, and I emerged more genuinely joyous than before,” she says. “Choosing to get pregnant during COVID, I have found to be such an act of hope and an act of resistance against this impending doom.”
That sense of joy is on full display in Human Magic, which finds Glazer marveling at the surreal experience of being a mom, including why she thinks smoking weed makes her a better parent, while also acknowledging the intense anxiety that comes with having a toddler. It’s a different side of Glazer than the one that fans of Broad City came to know and love, but one she hopes they will accept as she heads into this next stage of her life and career.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
One piece of the special that really spoke to me, as a parent, and something I hadn’t seen a lot in comedy, is how honest you are about the anxiety of parenting. I’m curious about the process of turning something like that into stand-up material, because it starts as something that is very nerve-wracking, and anxiety is not inherently funny on its own. But then you turn it into something very funny on stage. So what is that process like for you of taking those real feelings and finding ways to make them funny?
I guess it’s my way of dealing with things privately. I’ve been doing comedy for 18, 19 years now. And now it’s like, I’m able to zoom out and see this whole process. That final bit in the hour about the anxiety of watching my child learn to eat solid foods—it’s bonkers if you think about it. I’m a really anxious person, and I think perhaps I have a disproportionate reaction to things, or I’m just on edge to begin with. Laughing at myself helps me move past it and see beyond myself, which I think is what comedy does for culture at large.
For people who know you from Broad City, or even your character in Babes, thinking of you as an anxious person might seem odd. Because the character that you are best known for is this freewheeling stoner who does whatever she wants. Did you want to show sort of a different side of yourself in your stand-up? Is that in your head at all, like, I want to show that I’m not necessarily this person that everybody thinks I am?
I have those desires to be seen in a particular kind of way, but I do a lot of work to accept the fact that I can’t really control the way I am received. I can only put out what I put out, And I feel like the freewheeling stoner vibe is perhaps an easier way to grasp what my character or my comedic voice is, But even in Broad City, remember the episode where my character Ilana has a SAD [seasonal affective disorder] lamp? We know this character to be so joyous, but we also do know her to be anxious. Anxious about Abbi’s love, and depressed too. That episode is particularly about depression, and I think what really has resonated with people is that complexity. I feel like perhaps our culture is getting to a certain place with storytelling and telling our own stories on social media for how toxic and bats–-t it is, it’s expansive, too. When Broad City came out, and since I’ve had the privilege of putting my work out in this way, there’s been more room for complexity and characters.
Like in my stand-up special when I’m talking about how I’ve been a stoner for decades, but I’ve never gotten high and immediately chilled. I’ve exclusively gotten high, had a panic attack, and earned my chill. And the curling smile that I remember all of these beautiful audiences across the country having, relating to that, like, they too are struggling. It’s not even like you smoke weed and you’re so happy. You smoke weed, and then you have to deal with the fact that you smoked weed, and deal with all the feelings and thoughts that you had before, but now you’re high. I think there’s more room for those kinds of layers.
Yeah, it’s kind of wild to think about the audience that has grown up with you in a way. It’s been almost 11 years since Broad City premiered on Comedy Central. But then, of course, it was a web series for several years before that. So there are these people who’ve been watching you for over a decade, since they were in their early twenties, or younger, and now maybe they are parents like you. What are your interactions like with fans who’ve had this very long relationship with you at this point?
I mean, it’s very sweet. I’m still coming to terms with believing it, that people come and share their love with me. And it’s changed over time. When I was younger I was really disturbed by the fact that I am so anxious and different from my groovy Broad City character. And I feared disappointing people. I felt like I was being caught, in a way.
There are big expectations for what it’s going to be like to meet you.
Yeah, people would really think I wanted to get high right then. And I was like, that is so not what I want to do at all right now, that sounds really anxiety provoking. Since COVID, I think people have just gotten more sensitive about space in general. And since I’ve gotten older and become a parent, I find the interactions a lot softer and more in that mothering role. I went to a coffee shop the other day, and I’m ordering a coffee from this cute young person. And they’re like, “Oh my God, I just have to tell you, I’ve been watching you since I was 10.” And I was like… how old are you? They said they’re 21, and I was like, that actually checks out. I thought we were definitely the same age, could totally relate on what is cool out there, but that makes sense.
Watching Broad City now, it just feels like this incredible thing where you and Abbi had a hundred percent freedom and control over what you wanted to say, that it was just totally your show and your vision on screen. Is that true? Or were there secret conflicts with the network behind the scenes? Or was it as easy to make it what you wanted as it seems?
I mean, it was never easy. It was always incredibly laborious. We were really birthing something over and over and over again. Having made 35 short films in two years is what made this whole thing possible. You don’t really get queer Jewy women at the center of TV shows or films very often. And certainly not women who are seeking pleasure and sex and drugs and self-actualization so blatantly. Focusing on our little world of the web series for two years, and producing so much work, not only prepared us for the actual labor of the TV show, but exemplified undeniably that we had a vision, and that the best thing you could do with that vision is leave it alone. There was s–-t that we had to curb or soften, or chose not to do ourselves, but it was really always from the inside out that we were making that show.
Is there an example of anything that you’re thinking of, something you wanted to do that maybe you were either talked out of, or didn’t happen for whatever reason?
You know what’s so crazy? We were going to do that Birthright episode. We were actually going to film in Israel.
Oh, wow, yeah, because there is the episode where you’re on the plane to Israel, but then you don’t actually make it there.
There was violence happening between Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t think either one of us had taken our journey into understanding the situation there to the degree that we do now, but it was just a bad vibe. And we were promised all of this army protection, you can film and there will be soldiers there with guns, and we were like, wait, what are we doing? We have to fully pull the plug. This is not appealing and that’s not what safety sounds like. And yeah, we pulled it.
What was the storyline in Israel?
It’s unfortunate, it was really funny. It included the Red Sea curing my bacne. It had one of the few very famous Black Jews—like, perhaps Zoë Kravitz—representing Jesus in a mirage on the desert. It was really funny, but we just were like, we have to rewrite this.
And that’s how it became the episode that took place on the plane to Israel?
Yeah. It was supposed to be an hour-long finale of that season, but it just got really scary at the last minute. Our director, Lucia Aniello, one of the creators of Hacks, was literally walking to the door with her suitcase to go location-scout when she got the call that we were like, ‘We can’t do this, dude. This is freaking us out.’
Are you glad now that you didn’t do an episode in Israel? I feel like that’s the kind of thing that may not have aged as well as you would have liked.
I’m very glad, and I actually feel like our values now are related to why we pulled the plug then. It’s just kind of funny how things unfold.
You mentioned that it was difficult to walk away from Broad City, even though it was your decision after five seasons. I have a friend, who still, I believe, has not watched the very last episode because she’s such a big fan and does not want it to be over. That’s how much she loves your show that she cannot bring herself to watch the final episode.
Wow. I get it, I get it. To speak to your friend’s decision not to watch the last episode, that is one way of dealing with an ending. I haven’t watched Broad City since it aired. Abbi and I would get together for most of the episodes, to watch it arrive on TV. It was unbelievable. But the decision to end Broad City came from within. We had produced so many episodes and seasons we were so proud of, and we felt like we were starting to shift into a place where we couldn’t tell the stories of fledgling twentysomethings anymore. We made 50 episodes and we wore every hat. We were the head writers, we wrote scripts, we were the executive producers, we rewrote the scripts according to production limitations. We were the stars, which was this all-consuming thing, which just turned me inside out with my muscles and organs on the outside of my body, my heart and my mind on the outside of my body. And we directed episodes, and we were in the edit. With the press tours that we did, the show was taking 11 months of a year per season, and after five years—10 years of Broad City universe from the web series to the TV show, we just knew that we had to do the hard thing of wrapping it up. We felt ourselves no longer being able to serve at the quality that we had for five seasons. And I think we took that responsibility really seriously.
Why do you think you haven’t watched it since it ended? And do you think you ever will?
The pilot I’ve seen a million times, and I’ve seen all these episodes probably seven times with edits and then seeing them on air. My husband and I watched the second episode recently, and we could only make it through one act. We were dying laughing. But it was like, OK, just one act, and like we’ll pick it back up. It’s almost looking at your high school yearbook or like old photo albums. It feels so personal, and registers in my body as something different, I guess, than a viewer consuming it as art. It feels like this personal record that brings me back to that time and while it’s intensely joyous, it’s really intense and I don’t think I have the space to have all those feelings right now.
Broad City, like everything else, is IP now. There could be somebody wanting you to bring it back. Is that something you would even contemplate at this point?
I mean, I would definitely contemplate it. And it would be so fun. I shouldn’t speak for Abbi, I’ll speak for myself. Creatively, I feel like I need to understand who I am as a solo voice before re-entering such a magnetic, all-consuming duo and team. It is so fun and so seductive to think about. But for my personal growth, I need to keep taking space, to know who I am aside from Broad City. But I mean, of course, it’s so delicious to think about, and I totally would at some point.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
