Ilana Glazer wanted to know if anyone was stoned.
A few hands went up during a recent standup set in Stamford, Conn. She then admitted she didn’t smoke as much pot as she used to, and welcomed the light boos.
With “Broad City,” Glazer taught a generation of young people it was OK to mess up, and if they did it with a joint in their hand, all the better. Glazer and her co-creator and co-star, Abbi Jacobson, mothered their audience “culturally,” as Glazer recently put it.
Glazer is now actually a mother, preparing for a tour of the United States and Europe that starts Tuesday, hosting a podcast and organizing other moms ahead of the midterm elections. But she says she is still very much herself, even if she doesn’t smoke as much weed as she once did.
“We are pressured to segregate parts of ourselves into who I was, who I will be — the not-mom me and the mom me,” Glazer, 39, said in an interview. “I am finding that there is enough room in me for all the parts of me to be me. And the wider I can open my arms to myself, the more aligned I realize I already am.”
“I’m horny, I like weed, I love people, I love to dance,” she added. “It’s always been this way.”
Still, there is no denying that things have changed for Glazer: Marriage and motherhood. The end of a tremendously successful television show. The loss of dear friends. Wrinkles. But she is embracing all of those changes in her comedy.
In her video podcast, “It’s Open With Ilana Glazer,” Glazer presses activists, politicians and comedians on their blueprints for change. She founded a grass-roots group, Moms & Neighbors for Safe & Fair U.S. Midterm Elections 2026, to get other moms involved in the election process. Her new stand-up hour is centered around her critique of billionaires “harshing my mellow,” while navigating the “absurdity” of the world as a functioning, therapy-dedicated millennial who happens to also love being a mom.
“If I weren’t laughing, I’d cry,” Glazer said. “I’m old enough, honestly, and experienced enough now to be able to make the place for grief in this hour. And it’s not grief like we’re really sad. It’s grief like we’re just looking at the sad things together.”
Glazer is busy. She took deep breaths before answering questions at a restaurant in Brooklyn where the waiter knows she likes tuna with her salad. She prefers Tuesdays and Wednesdays for shows on the road so she can spend weekends with her family. She finds stillness between moments of excitement and exasperation.
“I have so much passion for the world, and I have just a creative engine that I know is just, like, in my bones,” she said. “I also am looking to simplify in ways, but it might not be my time to simplify, you know? I think I’m in an expansion, this natural expansion, that I can’t help.”
Glazer began building her new stand-up hour last year after finishing her debut Broadway run in “Good Night, and Good Luck” opposite George Clooney as the journalist Shirley Wershba. Last July, she did two two-hour shows on consecutive days at City Winery in Manhattan, starting at 4 p.m. so she could be home for bedtime.
She let the material rest for a few months before transcribing the entire two hours and organizing it into 10-minute bits. She tried out those bits in smaller clubs around New York City in the fall, got feedback from her husband and a few fellow stand-up comedians and kept tightening it into a single hour.
Glazer is approaching this tour with a new sense of confidence. Although she has toured five times, she said it wasn’t until her 2024 tour, which culminated in a Hulu special, “Human Magic,” that she came to understand the craft and business of stand-up comedy.
“An uncertainty has been quelled,” Glazer said. Building her new hour “felt like I was actually approaching a craft rather than swimming and being like, what body of water am I in?”
Kelsie Kiley, who has known and worked with Glazer since 2012, including as a producer of “Broad City” and of Glazer’s podcast, said it “feels like everything that she has been working for is kind of swirling around and coming into one.”
Glazer initially set out to develop a stand-up set centered around everyday life: arriving at the grocery store and actually checking things off her list because she isn’t stoned; the “brotopia” of gyms and doing leg presses like she’s pushing a male gynecologist away; taking drugs she once used recreationally that she now needs to function.
“I love getting older,” she says in the show. “I’m approaching the age I’ve always been: 40.”
But she couldn’t ignore what feels like a “a power structure that is trying to kill us,” she said in the interview. Throughout the set, for instance, she swats at Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires as if they were mosquitoes.
She also finds connection in the “shared reality” of parenthood — the roller coaster of bedtime routines, the emotional maturity of toddlers (her daughter is 4) and why breastfeeding at brunch might be the biggest flex as a new mom.
“I think the more specific I am with the experience, the more understandable it can be to someone who hasn’t had it,” she said.
Glazer’s greatest strength is her empathy, her friend Kiley said.
“The way that she approaches everything is truly with such a global view in a way of respecting and the human spirit,” Kiley said. “I think that that’s one of the magic things about Ilana that really helps other people resonate with her.”
That empathy has helped sustain an audience that Glazer spent years nurturing. “Broad City,” which ran for five seasons on Comedy Central, from 2014 to 2019, was a platonic love story about two best friends. People still come up to Glazer and talk about the show as if it’s still on the air.
It’s no surprise to Alison Leiby, a comedian, collaborator and friend who said she finds Glazer’s earnestness “genuinely refreshing.”
“When she tells you something you believe it, and I think that’s such a magic trick when it comes to stand-up,” she said.
Turning serious topics like fascism, climate change and social welfare into stand-up bits is difficult, Leiby said.
“It is always kind of this battle and it takes time, and the time when you’re figuring it out gets really uncomfortable,” said Leiby, who created a one-hour comedy show about her abortion. “It’s so exciting to see anybody figure that out. But I think especially her, who is so funny, but also is so engaged.”
For Glazer, it’s is all part of defining herself away from the adventures of Ilana Wexler and Abbi Abrams on “Broad City.”
After all, her fans are growing up, too.
“I’m really looking to understand what is my distinct voice,” she said. “I don’t even feel like I’m there yet, and that’s actually energizing to me.”
Remy Tumin
Breaking news reporter
I grew up watching Ilana Glazer navigate the wilds of being a 20-something in New York City as a fellow 20-something in New York City. But in recent months, she kept popping up all over my feeds talking about a very different topic: motherhood. This made sense for my algorithm given I had just had a baby myself. I reached out to Glazer to see if she was interested in talking about where she was at in life and work — a new tour, a new podcast, organizing other moms — and how that was intersecting with being a parent. When we sat down for our interview, she almost immediately started asking me about my experience as a new mom. It was important to her to hear about my journey as a parent so she could respond with better context.
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Source:
www.nytimes.com
