by Joy Press
Schumer finally asks, quite innocently, “Who tells men when it’s their last fuckable day?” The older women roar with laughter.
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Amy Schumer ekes comedy out of constriction; she makes us laugh at the ways women succumb to the grim traps man-made civilization has set, or how they try to crawl out of them. Lurking behind all those confrontational jokes about body parts and physical imperfection, though, are hints of real self-loathing that resonate with most women at some level. Even the silliest sketch never strays too far from the malevolent real world.
What’s so exhilarating and, arguably, subversive about Broad City is that its comedy is shameless. The twenty-something characters played by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer joyfully caper through a carnivalesque version of New York City in which those man-made traps are irrelevant. Pitched somewhere between superheroines and cartoons, they seem to exist in a world built for them alone. The city is not so much an urban jungle as a giant, sweaty jungle gym supplying the duo with nonstop adventures and an endless supply of weed. Men are, at best, coconspirators, sex toys, and love objects; at worst, they are ineffectual fools who stand between the women and their fun.
Chief mischief-maker Ilana Wexler (Glazer) is a polymorphously perverse hedonist who dresses like a dancer in a nineties hip-hop video. A perpetual motion machine, she frequently busts into impromptu cartwheels and keeps a supply of marijuana tucked into her nether regions. (While Amy Schumer worries about her stinky pussy, Ilana proudly calls her va-yine-ya “nature’s pocket,” explaining that its strong natural odor “masks the smell” of weed, throwing any nearby sniffer dogs off the scent.) Ilana exasperates workmates at her Internet sales job with her laziness and insubordination. One colleague keeps a daily record of her misdeeds: “Day Two-seventy-four: Five hours late. Wearing a napkin as a shirt. Violently high.”
In the tradition of odd couples, Abbi Abrams (Jacobson) is the yin to Ilana’s yang. A more hesitant, earnest soul, Abbi schedules time to masturbate, moons awkwardly over her hot neighbor, Jeremy, and dreams of becoming a trainer at Soulstice, the fancy gym where she works as a janitor, mopping up other people’s pubes and vomit. (Paul Downs plays her boss, Trey, a zealous trainer with a secret porn-star past.) A former jam-band obsessive, Abbi worships at the altar of Oprah—she even has an Oprah lower-back tattoo—while Ilana reveres Rihanna. In fact, sometimes Ilana seems convinced that she is an African American drag queen, rather than a frizzy-haired nonpracticing Jewess from Queens.
It’s usually Ilana who lures Abbi into madcap hijinks, such as answering a Craigslist ad to clean the apartment of a man in a diaper, or swapping identities so that Abbi can take Ilana’s shift at the local food co-op. Abbi’s impersonation perfectly embodies Ilana’s manic overconfidence as she twerks through the food co-op’s produce aisles, blurting politically correct catchphrases at random, such as “Rape culture sucks!” Ilana dates a doting African American dentist named Lincoln (played with slow-burn mellowness by stand-up comedian Hannibal Buress), but the true love of her life is Abbi. They support each other’s ambitions (or lack of). As Ilana announces in the opening moments of Broad City’s pilot, “Today is the day we become the boss bitches that we are in our minds.”
Jacobson and Glazer first met at improv hub Upright Citizens Brigade. Just as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were the only women in their Second City touring group, Jacobson and Glazer found themselves as the only broads on a UCB practice team called Secret Promise Circle. They bonded over shared influences such as SNL, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Roseanne and decided to make a Web series based on their own experiences.
This was 2009, the same year Lena Dunham launched her second Web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. Creating shows on the Internet was starting to look more like a calling card than a hobby. A growing audience watched these videos, and conventional television networks were trying to figure out how to tap this new talent pool and win back viewers. ABC adapted MSN’s In the Motherhood (executive-produced by Jenni Konner); Nickelodeon swooped up YouTube star Fred. Neither fared very well when transferred to TV schedules, but it seemed likely this medium would eventually yield some stars. For creators, the appeal was the low bar to entry: all you needed was a friend to film you.
Jacobson and Glazer began shooting short lo-fi videos around town featuring exaggerated versions of themselves: two broke single girls with crappy jobs and few responsibilities. No complicated plots were required, as most of these YouTube videos didn’t run more than five minutes. They were grubby, believable slices of life enlivened by the chemistry between these two women. Episodes pivoted around mundane activities such as a sleepover or a Skype conversation. A brunch with their mothers (played by their real moms) begins with the older women wondering if their daughters are lovers and culminates in a physical altercation.
Filmed over the course of a year and a half, the episodes grew more polished. Jacobson and Glazer had day jobs at the Groupon-ish website Lifebooker along with their fellow UCBer Lucia Aniello, but they decided it was time to take their Web series more seriously. They began writing episodes in advance, paying directors, feeding their crew, creating merchandise, and doing self-promotion. Those more rigorous production values are evident in the penultimate episode, a joyous homage to the opening sequence of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. After a string of creepy neighborhood guys sexually harass Abbi and Ilana, the two women reenact Rosie Perez’s ferocious dance sequence from the movie, gyrating to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” It’s a taste of what Broad City would become: two young Jewish women as agents of gleeful mayhem, an explosion of irrational exuberance.
With their cult following growing, the women decided to reach out to one of their idols, UCB cofounder Amy Poehler, to ask if she’d appear in the last episode of season two. She not only made a cameo but also agreed to executive-produce a series for them, and set about finding them a network deal.
When Brooke Posch took over as Comedy Central’s VP of original programming and development on the East Coast in May 2012, she had no plans to transform the network into a hive of female comedy. The pilot for Inside Amy Schumer was delivered about a week into her tenure, and she would oversee its birth. But, she says, execs gave her no mandate to bring in more women’s voices.
One of the first people to congratulate Posch on her new job, however, was Amy Poehler. Posch had worked as an assistant at SNL for a while, and the women had remained friends. They went out for drinks, and Poehler raved to her about a show she was producing with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. “The girls and Poehler came into my office the first week I started. I had nothing on the walls, I had no staff. It was me, an assistant, and a lamp,” Posch recalls. This was the first pitch she had heard at Comedy Central, and she was instantly smitten. “Abbi and Ilana were just like lightning in a bottle.” The two women effervescently bounced off each other, every new sentence an unexpected adventure. Posch had never related to the high-end heroines of Sex and the City, but in Broad City, she saw women she could adore.
“They are not rich, they are struggling to get by, and they put each other first. These are girls who love each other, who are best friends. That is the DNA of Broad City.” The moment they left the room, Posch continues, “I called Kent [Alterman] and said, I am obsessed with them. I want this to be the first thing I buy.”
Although there are plenty of similarities between the creators and their lead characters, Jacobson and Glazer are anything but slackers. “We are writing versions of ourselves without drive, without knowing what they want to do,” Jacobson tells me. They came to Comedy Central with a very sharp vision for their series. For starters, they knew they wanted the pilot to be directed by Lucia Aniello, their UCB and Lifebooker colleague, who’d already worked on some episodes of the online Broad City. With partner Paul Downs, Aniello had been creating her own online comedy videos, loopy pop-culture parodies such as “The Real Housewives of South Boston” and “Diary of Zac Efron.” Hiring her was something of a risk—A
niello had never directed anything for conventional television—but Posch acceded to Jacobson and Glazer’s choice: “She knew the girls, she got their comedy.” Aniello’s visual aesthetic was gracefully anarchic, crammed with “big pants-down moments that feel very real,” as she describes it.
Comedy Central picked up the show for a full season, and Jacobson and Glazer filled the writers’ room with friends such as SNL writer Chris Kelly, Aniello, and Downs. “Lack of experience was our North Star,” Downs says. “And because we were all best friends, it was easy to tell stories that were truthful to us. Everyone in that room had experience with locking themselves out of their apartment for the ninth time or . . .” Aniello jumps in: “. . . having to pick up a package at a FedEx office that was so far away from your apartment it was like another world.” That’s a reference to an early Broad City episode written by the couple in which a missed delivery sends Abbi on a Kafkaesque search to a dilapidated island where an old crone sits in a warehouse guarding unclaimed packages.
Because Jacobson and Glazer had no television experience, Comedy Central partnered them with a showrunner: TV writer Tami Sagher, a veteran of 30 Rock, Psych, and How I Met Your Mother. “Abbi and Ilana respected her, but you could say we created a bad arranged marriage,” Posch admits. “Tami had all these credits, they had their voice, and it lasted for . . . three months?” The Broad City creators bridled at having someone else in charge of their brainchild. “Abbi and Ilana came to us and they were like, ‘We know the voice of our show. We don’t want to make an old-fashioned sitcom. We don’t want every act tied in a perfect bow. We want this to be its own beast and not follow any rules.’ ”
Soon, Jacobson and Glazer were showrunning Broad City themselves, with all the juggling that entails: conceptualizing, writing, acting, producing, and editing episodes. Amy Poehler weighed in on every script treatment and joined them for meetings and table reads. Her influence is evident in the show’s joie de vivre. Even when Abbi and Ilana are doing something vile or debauched, their fundamental sweetness shines through.
“She always encouraged us in terms of having women who are unpolished and fart and have sex casually,” Downs says of Poehler. In her own work, Poehler is a genius at infusing zany physical comedy with empathy. “She also steers us toward the heart of relationships,” says Downs. “Whether it’s Ilana and Abbi, or Lincoln and Ilana, she wants them to feel real and grounded.”
Aniello recalls a conversation about creating a scene where one of the women has a guy in her bed. Poehler suggested they just show the man without further discussion: “We would make it clear he wasn’t the heart of the story. I remember her saying, ‘It’s not about the guy; it’s about the rest of her day.’ ” That played out in the very first scene of the series: The two women are chattering away over Skype, until Abbi realizes that Ilana is nonchalantly having sex with Lincoln while they speak. Lincoln appears to be a model boyfriend, and a perfect foil for Ilana: calm where she is hyper, steady where she is capricious, a hardworking dentist where she is a recalcitrant slacker (at a workplace directly modeled on Lifebooker’s). Yet Lincoln remains little more than a plaything for Ilana, because Abbi is her priority. On Broad City, hos always come before bros. As Poehler once told the New Yorker, “There aren’t enough like them on TV: confident, sexually active women, girlfriends who love each other the most.”
Just as it was inevitable that Girls would be measured against Sex and the City, Broad City was doomed to be held up against Girls—as if only one show about white boho twenty-something women could thrive at a time. IndieWire offered a primer on “Why Broad City Is the Anti-Girls,” while the New York Post offered “5 things Broad City offers that Girls doesn’t.”
In almost every head-to-head comparison, Broad City came away the conqueror. That’s probably because Broad City’s version of youthful urban life simultaneously feels more realistic than Girls’s—the cast is multiracial, the streets are dirtier, and the cash-poor central characters are far less cocooned in privilege—while also being dreamlike. The essence of Broad City is antic surrealism. Abbi and Ilana romp through one misadventure after another without real responsibilities or serious consequences, just like dudes in a nineties buddy movie. Sure, they might lock themselves out of their apartments and get Maced by a suspicious neighbor, or they might end up vomiting after a night of partying, but we never see them dealing with unfunny Girls-caliber traumas such as OCD, drug addiction, or abortion. With the brief exception of a few 2017 episodes dealing with seasonal affective disorder, Abbi and Ilana levitate in a glorious bubble of laughing gas. Really, these girls just want to have fun.
As Hannah and her soul sisters fumblingly try to grow up, they can’t seem to stop hurting and outgrowing one another. Dunham’s vision of volatile friendship is closer to my own youthful experiences, but that makes it all the more pleasurable to revel in the idealized girl-buddy fantasy that is Broad City. While the Girls pick at one another’s flaws, Abbi and Ilana delight in each other like voracious lovers, with each going to absurd extremes to help the other. After Ilana has an allergic reaction to shellfish at a fancy restaurant, Abbi morphs into the Incredible Hulk (crossed with Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman) and carries her ailing friend to the hospital. In another episode, after the water shuts off during a party, Ilana removes Abbi’s turd from her nonworking toilet and duct-tapes it to her stomach to smuggle it out of the apartment without anyone knowing. She proudly declares herself Abbi’s “doo-doo ninja.”
Each is equally elated when something goes right for the other. When Abbi’s crush Jeremy asks her to peg him (i.e., penetrate him with a strap-on dildo), she turns to her friend for advice. The sexually omnivorous Ilana breathlessly encourages her friend to seize life by the balls—or, in this case, by the shaft. The camera watches Abbi from behind as she swaggers into the room, the green plastic penis substitute swinging between her legs. Afterward, Abbi calls Ilana to give her the play-by-play. Although Ilana is sitting shivah for her own grandmother, she shrieks, “This is the happiest day of my life!” Somehow this anal sex-capade is transformed into a sentimental moment, more about sisterhood than about Abbi scoring with her next-door neighbor. Upon hearing of the pegging adventure, Ilana’s equally open-minded mother, Bobbi (Susie Essman), kvells like a proud Jewish mother: “Good for you for trying something new!”
Sexuality in Broad City is female-centered, casual, and played for giggles; it takes gender conventions and makes Silly String out of them. Abbi and Ilana openly lust after guys; they even guess at guys’ genital endowments while watching a pickup basketball game in the park. (One of the players politely tells the duo their female gaze makes them uncomfortable.) In another episode, Abbi worries that she has raped a guy (played by Seth Rogen): he fainted from heat exhaustion mid-intercourse, but she kept grinding on his unconscious body.
Although Abbi and Ilana frequently get naked, their bits and pieces are always blurred or covered by bars. Glazer and Jacobson insist they aren’t trying to make a political point about women’s bodies; they just want to make people laugh. Some of the show’s most extreme scenarios start out as dares in the writers’ room, as the friends egg each other on. “It’s very deceptive, because we are so comfortable in the writers’ room, and when we are writing scenes, it all sounds so funny. But when it actually comes upon you, it really is scary,” Glazer tells me. Jacobson adds forlornly, “Once we start shooting, we realize, We are the people who have to be in this. What were we thinking?”
Part of Broad City’s brilliance is the way it short-circuits rational thinking. So much ambient amusement emerges from the nonstop physical comedy: tiny, ridiculous facial gestures or grand moments of anarchic release, such as Abbi wildly hallucinating her way through Whole Foods on painkillers after having her wisdom teeth removed. Tightly scripted chain reactions often propel the duo through zany escapades. In one episode, Ilana’s mother’s search for a counterfeit purse in Chinatown leads them on a journey into the sewer system.
In another, Abbi’s need to pee triggers a haywire series of events that includes Abbi’s getting trapped in a flying Porta Potty and Ilana magnetically sticking to the back of a truck that’s whizzing through New York City traffic.
That slapstick attitude radiates from the split-screen montage that opens season three, directed by Aniello. A visual manifesto for Broad City, it jump-cuts across six months of activity in each woman’s bathroom. We watch them check breasts for lumps, fart, puke, shave, and stare at pregnancy tests. At one point, Lincoln goes down on Ilana on one half of the screen while Abbi reads Hillary Clinton’s memoir on the other side; a moment later, Abbi is flushing a dead fish down the toilet while Ilana reads the same book. The minute-and-a-half-long sequence ends with them puffing on their bongs and rushing off to meet each other. Broad City had made a feminist statement out of toilet time, officially reclaiming bathroom humor from the boys.
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Amy Schumer dropped some toilet humor of her own into the third-season opener of Inside Amy. A parody of a rap video, “Milk Milk Lemonade” mocks pop culture’s booty obsession by stretching it to its limits. Accompanied by Amber Rose and Method Man, Schumer chants “Milk, milk, lemonade / ’round the corner fudge is made” as the camera pans over a sea of gyrating asses. “This is where our poop comes out,” Schumer confirms flatly late in the song, “This is what you think is hot.” Released in advance of the season-premiere episode in April 2015, the vibrant, candy-colored video quickly went viral.
A few months later, Tina Fey presented Schumer with the prestigious Peabody Award. After attempting to “suck her soul out in a very awkward staged lesbian kiss,” Fey paid homage to a more serious side of the younger comedian’s work: “Many people will tell you that you can never, ever joke about rape, but it is all about context and point of view, and Amy and the Inside Amy Schumer show’s brilliant sketch about sexual abuse in the military as filtered through violent combat video games was inarguably funny and so, so rapey.”