ILana Glazer is trying to imagine films about pregnancy and early parenthood that aren’t told from the male perspective. “Knocked Up is about Seth Rogen. Nine Months is about Hugh Grant. Three Men and a Baby is about three“What?!” the 37-year-old says in comical disbelief (making me laugh out loud in the process).
Grazer, best known as the co-creator of the iconic millennial sitcom Broad City, has pointed out a serious problem: a shocking lack of movies about childbirth and babies that focus on the women’s experience. But the comedian’s attempt to rectify this has come in the form of a decidedly non-serious film. In fact, Babes may be one of the rawest and funniest movies about motherhood ever made.
Babes tells the story of Eden (Glazer), a free-spirited yoga teacher who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and seeks support from her best friend and fellow New Yorker, Dawn (Michelle Buteau), a hurt and exhausted mother of two. But over this sweet meditation on female friendship is layered a barrage of tear-jerkingly funny riffs on the most heady aspects of childbirth, from the surreal misery of pumping milk to the terrifying intersection of birth and defecation. Babes is unrelentingly wild and grotesque in some ways, but the events it depicts are also utterly mundane. One thing that quickly becomes clear is that the comedy of the mother’s body is an unusually rich yet criminally ignored layer of comedy.
Glaser began writing Babes in 2021, based on an idea pitched to her by her agent, Suzie Fox. It had been two years since Broad City ended, and the pair had been brainstorming about a new project. Fox, who, like Dawn, has two young children, had imagined what would happen if a close, single friend unexpectedly became pregnant. What Fox didn’t know was that Glaser (who has been married to scientist David Lukelin since 2017) was pregnant. Coincidentally, her writing partner, Josh Rabinowitz, was also pregnant.
The two began crowdsourcing crazy stories about pregnancy and motherhood from their own circle of friends, but also from Eden’s “naive, excited” perspective, Glaser says. “I’d heard you were losing sleep, but I didn’t realize how severe it was…” she pauses for a few seconds, searching for the right words.It takes effort “Having children”
Babes is a great example of what the industry calls hard comedy: the increasingly rare task of actually making you belly-laugh. The team’s motto was “big comedy with a big heart.” Our North Stars were Superbad and Bridesmaids. But Babes is also packed with emotional truth. In the film’s dramatic climax, the pair have a fight, during which Dawn gives a speech about the destructive power of motherhood. Foxx tells the pregnant couple that she had “no idea.” “I thought, ‘Bitch, you Write that down,” Glaser recalled. “So [Fox] “We just spit words out over email and then edit and put it together. But this raw honesty can only come from someone who’s been in a bind.” By the end of the writing process, Glaser and Rabinowitz (who are both parents now) “had definitely been in Dawn’s shoes.”
And yet Eden is quintessential Glazer. On Broad City, the comedian played her half-namesake Ilana Wexler, a sex-crazed, sociopath-confident character. Eden, the outrageous comedy engine of Babes, has a lot in common with her: both are incredibly chatty, self-consciously quirky and fiercely rooting for their best friends. And then there’s the real-life Glazer, who, speaking over Zoom from her New York home (mid-conversation she reveals in singsong panic that her phone battery is at 9% – “It’s great!”) is thrillingly relatable. Like her fictional self, she embodies a buffoonish height of American mania, but is tempered by earthy idiosyncrasies. Her penchant for comical pronunciation on screen is also clearly a genuine personality trait (today, it’s easy to dismiss it as “television.”)Vis“-i-on” has five syllables.
Glazer acknowledges that the line between herself and her characters is blurred — “there’s a continuum,” but that intensive therapy has helped her clarify the differences: “I had to work a lot to understand the difference between Ilana Wexler and Ilana Glazer the private person and Ilana Glazer the comedian.” But Glazer also believes that pouring yourself into your characters is key to succeeding as a comedian. “As an eternal comedy nerd,” she believes, “I can sniff out when someone is being real or fake or being their true self.”
There’s one crucial difference between Grazer and her character, one that has played a crucial role in her ascent in the US comedy world. With Babes, Grazer’s goal, along with director Pamela Adlon (who created and starred in the stellar single-parent drama Better Things), was to make “an indie comedy that looked and felt like a studio comedy.” The resulting 25-day shoot was “grueling” under time and budgetary constraints, and mentally taxing. Grazer “went days without seeing my daughter. I’d leave before she woke up, and then I’d come home and just smell her.”
Though Glazer would like more money for future projects, she knows she thrives under pressure. “Broad City was low-budget, and I’m used to that kind of situation, and it really helps with my mania and my OCD,” she says. That kind of intensity and overthinking can be “annoying in my personal life,” but “it’s really helpful in my professional life.” [on set] And then I can rattle off five solutions, delegate them, and make sure they get done. That’s where my athleticism comes in.”
This ruthlessly efficient productivity isn’t what you’d associate with the protagonists of Broad City, the web series that Glazer created with Abbi Jacobson in 2009. By 2014, the show had run for five seasons as a beloved, critically acclaimed sitcom (it was named the 9th best TV show of the 2010s by Vanity Fair and the 96th best show of the 21st century by The Journal), chronicling the surreal, slacker-esque adventures of Wexler and Jacobson’s Abbi Abrams (a wannabe personal trainer whose tremulous awkwardness is the perfect counterbalance to Ilana’s delusional self-confidence) and their lives revolving around the random, fragmented fun of it all.
Glazer first met Jacobson in a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the renowned alternative comedy school co-founded by Amy Poehler that has nurtured such talents as Aubrey Plaza, Donald Glover, and The Bear star Ayo Edebiri. The two bonded over what Glazer calls “a rhythm of terrible jobs that made us both take each other seriously,” and a comedic romance was born. The contrast between their portrayals of directionless youth and the responsibilities of showrunners is “crazy, Rachel. Unreasonable“My husband says I blacked out while filming Broad City and unconsciously became as free-spirited and pleasure-seeking as Ilana Wexler.”
Glazer describes herself as “very anxious.” She pauses to laugh maniacally. The stress of directing a hit TV show means “the fun on screen is the fun we don’t get to have,” and the series has become a way to relieve stress.
For Glaser, anxiety and comedy were inextricably intertwined from the beginning. As a child growing up on Long Island, she would spend hours drawing sketches with her brother, Elliot, who is now a TV writer. Glaser always knew she was funny, but “it took me years of therapy to realize that it was a defense mechanism. It wasn’t from confidence, it was from total social anxiety and insecurity. But at least I knew I was a good performer.”
There’s no arguing with that point. Glazer’s performances in Broad City and Babes are fun and uniquely entertaining. She recently re-watched the former with her husband and was still delighted, calling it “so funny, it was hilarious to die for,” but ended up being so overwhelmed that she couldn’t finish a single episode. Because the shows encompassed the most formative years of her life, Glazer had a hard time accepting the end of that era after they ended. Now, she feels, “young Abbie Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are my babies, and Abbie Abrams and Ilana Wexler are my babies.”
Add to that another fictional child named Eden (and baby Eden), as well as her own biological daughter, and it looks like comedy’s newest matriarch has quite the extended family.
Babes is now in cinemas.
