Ali Wong released her first Netflix comedy special in 2016 to wide acclaim—at least from all the places a Netflix comedy special would be courting enthusiastic reviews at the time.
As reviewer Michelle Ruiz put it for Vogue, “Until her, I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up. I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up pretending to trap a man’s head between her legs in simulated cunnilingus either, but this is the beauty of Baby Cobra.” Jason Zinoman of the New York Times meanwhile called Wong’s performance “something new, a pregnant woman in her third trimester delivering a deliriously filthy and funny hour of comedy woven into a sneakily feminist assault on the double standards of parenting.”
Going on a decade ago, it was refreshing, raw, what have you, to see a woman in this deeply domestic state, speaking about sex and bodies in a way more commonly associated with… well, with men. And a racialized woman, too—a further change of pace in the white, male world of stand-up.
During that era, Brooklyn hipster type comics Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer had moved their web series Broad City onto cable television, showing that young women—not just young men—could be hijinks-having stoners. We were still in the era (Knocked Up, 2007) where men (perhaps played by Seth Rogen) could be slackers and some no-nonsense woman, perhaps played Katherine Heigl, would be the responsible one. We’re kind of back in that era now, but for five minutes there, it was allowed that women sometimes slacked.
Like seemingly all millennial women, I was a huge fan of this show. I particularly loved the 2015 episode, “Knockoffs,” that weaves together a plot with Abbi’s character trying out a certain new act with a male partner and Ilana’s discount handbag shopping with her mother. It was the second of the two that truly made the episode, showcasing a part of the New York mother-daughter experience never before seen, or at least not seen since The Nanny. But you need both threads to make sense of what follows: The bargains turn out to be found underground, as in literally beneath the road, yielding one of the best comedic lines of all time: “All the good shit is always down a manhole.”
Art about slackerdom, told from the slacker’s perspective, is always a challenge, but they nailed it. Broad City was objectively delightful, but also innovative in a way of specific interest to me: it presented unambiguously Jewish, Jewish-looking young women as protagonists, not sidekicks. They were the comic relief and the ones out having sexual adventures, and going on a satirical version of Birthright Israel. After growing up surrounded by a Gwyneth-led beauty standard, I got a kick out of knowing that I now lived in a world where women like these were considered desirable. What’s it to me if men think Scarlett Johansson’s hot? Abby and Ilana, this is another matter.
I’m a few months older than Jacobson and (this will be relevant) a few years older than Glazer, but close enough in age to both that it was a bit like watching my own early-20s Brooklyn-dwelling life, except hilarious. I remember it as a kind of counterpoint to Lena Dunham’s Girls, about a not-dissimilar milieu and life stage, but just so much sillier, and therefore more my speed. While I can’t say I’m committed to realism or representation in my television viewing generally (or else why so devoted to Midsomer Murders?) there was something special about how this show was covering familiar-to-me territory and getting it so right.
***
As I will be the first in human history to observe, time passes. For most of us, it’s a bit who cares. It’s unremarkable if the classmate who partied hard at 19 is more settled-down at 39. Not so if you made a name for yourself as your own free-spirited slacker-stoner alter ego, the picture of unfettered youth. If you’re Ilana Glazer, if you played the less responsible of the Broad City broads, and had the audacity to grow up, get married, and have a kid, your fans may demand an explanation.
Glazer’s comedy special, Human Magic, filmed at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto last May and released in the final days of 2024 (streaming on Hulu in the U.S. but behind the beaded curtain on Disney Plus in Canada) , brings the fans up to speed. It reconciles the filthy-mind-possessing Ilana Wexler alter ego from Broad City with the grown-up, responsible, professionally accomplished Ilana Glazer before us today. It is also an attempt at making a 2010s… vibe? ethos? relevant to the 2020s.
Human Magic is the 2020s’ answer to Baby Cobra, which may be where things go awry. It’s no longer groundbreaking to be a pregnant woman or new mom who (glances around anxiously) does sex stuff. It is maybe slightly edgy to admit to being a mom who consumeth the marijuana, as Glazer does, as is central to her personal brand, but stonerdom itself isn’t the rebellion it once was, not with legal dispensaries surrounding the theatre she’s performing at on Yonge Street—to say nothing of the rest of North America—not with all the much-publicized research about alcohol as a carcinogen, making Team Weed seem as if they had the right idea all along.
That’s not to say there isn’t a twist. The twist is that Glazer is not like those other women who love their husbands and have babies with them and enjoy cleaning the house and help their inept-shopper husbands buy T-shirts. And I don’t just mean because she’s a famous person.
Glazer now describes herself as a “queer Jewy woman,” but does not elaborate on what sort of queer she—a woman with a husband—identifies as. A non-practising bisexual, one might guess. (Human Magic includes what might be the lewdest-ever way of expressing the fact that the speaker is monogamous, and much of the special is about her sexual history with men, though she does mime a sex act involving another woman, but only—hard to explain—to make a feminist point about microphones being too phallic.) And perhaps that as well, I have no idea.
A glance at Instagram and recent media coverage attests that Glazer uses she/her as well as they/them pronouns, suggesting that this is core to what Glazer’s referring to when speaking of queerness. Per a recent profile in The Independent—which was picked up by other clickbait headline outlets like it was still 2014—having a baby paradoxically tapped her into her own gender multitude (as versus the boring thing where it reminds you just how female you are), and today, “she identifies as a non-binary woman.”
"Broad City" star Ilana Glazer has opened up about their pregnancy, saying that the experience helped them realize that they are nonbinary. https://t.co/Q6bR2wkCfJ
— Them (@them) August 12, 2024
If this has you wondering who among us identifies as a binary woman, you are not alone. If you’re not wondering this, you are mad at me for having done so. Those are, you see, the only options.
But the interview got picked up, as they will, and held up as evidence that a beloved celebrity had Come Out As Queer. Fine, an assigned-female-at-birth, feminine-presenting, husband-having one, but why should any of that matter? It’s a big tent! Vogue publisher Condé Nast’s gender-celebrity website Them celebrated this revelation-of-sorts as follows: “We love a subtle non-binary slay, especially when it comes from none other than Ilana Glazer.”
The subtlety is undeniable. Blink and you’d miss it.
***
You can never know, when talking about another person, what’s a tentative first step on a journey, and what’s a gesture taken on for symbolic reasons. It’s entirely possible that tomorrow, Glazer will announce exclusively they/them—or he/they, or he/him—pronouns, and whichever material transitioning in whichever direction, and I will feel like a terrible person for having even fleetingly interpreted this as a case of a functionally if not technically straight lady presenting herself as more interesting (or oppressed) than she is.
It is also possible that I will wake up tomorrow with the politics and inclinations of someone born a micro-era later than I was (Glazer was born in 1987, whereas I’m an ancient ’83er, and this seems a critical difference for this sort of thing) and be putting she/they into my bios and—despite nothing substantively changing about me or how I live my life—everyone will have to walk on eggshells when discussing me and my bog-standard hetero household.
Everyone apart from the right-wing rabble-rousers, who take a different tack. Well those, and people who from-the-left critique such things, often with the derisive term, spicy straights.
My commitment to the she/her (or, more precisely, to not stating my pronouns and letting others come to the likeliest conclusion) is more a matter of generation or sensibilities than place on any gender spectrum. I have no reason to believe I am more comfortable in my femininity, or however you want to phrase such things, than Glazer is in hers. My hunch here—and it can only be a hunch, I’m not in her brain—is that we have different frameworks for understanding the same kinds of experiences.
Why, then, am I walking on eggshells talking about this? Why am I questioning my choice to use she/her for Glazer, wondering at 9:15 p.m. whether the Wikipedia entry’s use of they/them (which it notes is for consistency, just to pick something) ought to have trumped a newspaper profile’s she/her? If I had reason to believe Glazer consistently preferred they/them, I would use they/them, I have no whole thing about this, and believe in using the pronouns people request. Why do I feel like a bad guy here?
My jumpiness isn’t much of a mystery, though. It’s because I’m a repeat visitor to rodeos of this nature. There’s a subset of people who will be next-level furious at me for what they will call erasure, gatekeeping, transphobia. All this because of what is essentially a semantic difference of approach between two people whose lives are—apart from one of them being a famous person who helped create the brilliance that is Broad City—remarkably alike.
Who cares, and more to the point, what does any of this have to do with Human Magic?
The subtext of Human Magic is that Glazer is not just some straight-lady comic offering up relatable anecdotes. She’s someone you’d least expect to be leading such a conventional life. And she describes it all in this cool-kid tone that makes you almost forget that the things she’s talking about (loving your baby, enjoying sex with your husband) are, well, square.
***
I am not an Ilana Glazer-ologist, which is to say, my interest is the persona, not the person. And the persona she presents in Human Magic is no more or less conventionally feminine than the typical straight woman. It is not just the gushing about the husband (more on that in a moment), but visible to anyone with any familiarity with gendered self-presentation in our society. She’s dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder minidress or shirt-and-miniskirt (minskort?) combo, with black stockings, a chic necklace, and gorgeous shimmery eyeshadow.
Now someone could be as described and use any pronouns. But the overall effect—combined with Glazer’s own references to herself as a woman and “mom” throughout the special—suggests that one would not be misgendering Glazer to call her a woman. She calls herself a woman! (Why am I walking on eggshells?) And unlike her Broad City co-creator and co-star, who is married to another woman, Glazer is what one might call straight-passing. (A wife, if you’re a woman, is a dead giveaway about the not-straight thing.)
What I keep returning to is the T-shirt interlude. In this part of Human Magic, Glazer pokes gentle fun at her husband for his inability to buy his own clothes. She has to show him the websites and tell him what size he wears. Men!
This is standard stand-up fare. The bumbling husband, flummoxed by a domestic task, or maybe he deems it too trivial. There’s also something mildly absurd about how specifically I related to this (the scientist husband, those exact T-shirt websites). Queer Jewy women, straight Jewy women, not so different after all!.
Glazer is nothing if not a member of her moment. She admits that she’s married, but encourages applause for the divorcees in the audience at the start of the show, calling herself a “divorce enthusiast.” She performs—literally, she is on a stage—the requisite feminist ambivalence of being in an opposite-sex relationship. “I feel so lucky to be married to my husband, but it’s hard at baseline to be a woman married to a man. Cause I see him sometimes as [here she gets dramatically angry] SOME MAN, instead of the person I chose to spend my life with.”
It’s performative misandry, but it’s also heteropessimism—or what would be called that if the person experiencing it identified as heterosexual. Glazer negotiates a squickiness surrounding her quasi-straight-womanhood (straight quasi-womanhood?) by describing herself as pro-guys, anti-men, with a whole routine about the difference between guys and men. Something about guys wearing sweatpants to buy groceries and men wearing jeans to work out in.
The guys-good, men-bad bit is a little funny, maybe? Not earth-shattering. It taps into something in the culture, though. Specifically, to the loophole according to which you’re permitted to be a ban-men feminist and have a male partner, so long as you tell anyone who’ll listen that you’ve found one of the good ones. Where this is meant to leave the women married to less-good ones (are they victims or just bad feminists?) I’m never clear.
***
Human Magic has its moments, in the Baby Cobra mould. Glazer describes a medical exam she had before giving birth as being “fingered” and in a positive sense—something I think I might find unnerving to hear if I were the doctor who’d performed the exam, but it’s a comedy special, maybe this never happened! She recalls the expletives she uttered when in awe of the miracle of having just had her baby. She confesses—in a scandalous tone—that she enjoys performing oral sex. Is the audience meant to be scandalized because sex, or because the sex-haver is a mom, or is it that third thing: that it’s yeah kinda shameful to be into sex with men, if you’re a queer feminist?
Loving your husband, enjoying sex with him, liking that he can carry heavy items (“I’ll tell you one thing daddies can do: carry shit”) not liking that he can’t be bothered to order his own T-shirts, loving your baby, worrying about your baby eating solids and how that’s going, enjoying cleaning your house (this is, Glazer explains, her Shabbat ritual), these are all things that put Glazer in community with the wide world of basic straight ladies. (I detest cleaning my house, which puts me where on the gender spectrum?) She presents her preferences for ordinary things as shocking revelations—the subtext being, can you believe someone like ME is into this stuff?
The more I think of it, the stranger it all seems. Annoying, but also kind of brilliant? There’s a part about how the first time she had fully unprotected intercourse was when trying for a baby. She describes this entirely banal fact of how one plans a pregnancy in extremely funny terms that sound both erotic and sordid.
What Glazer does—and what puts her in the spirit of Ali Wong—is remind that getting older, moving through the various life stages, does not magically remove women’s humanness. (Human Magic the title refers to reproduction, but could as easily refer to what’s imagined happens to women when no longer 22 and carefree.) Human Magic reminds that mothers are also women, that women are also people. Not just as in, people deserving of human rights, but people whose minds go to places that our culture ascribes to teenage boys.
The breakthrough of Broad City was showing that what’s thought of as teenage-boy-ness exists in young women as well. Human Magic extends the privilege to slightly older women. In a way.
***
Is the special not that funny because it’s too sanctimonious? After all, Glazer is an outspoken progressive, Broad City had a Hillary Clinton cameo in 2016 (whole lot of good that did, but I digress), and is a supporter of the Palestinian cause.
But we are not in the realm of humourless scolding a la Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 anti-comedy comedy special, Nanette. Glazer’s comic timing is still there, her exaggerated expressions, and if some of her qualities that were charming on Broad City now inspire a bit of, you do realize you’re borderline middle-aged now yes?, like when she refers to her toddler as “dawg,” it is clear she does in fact realize this, and is in on the joke.
Glazer comes across as aware she’s known for having righteous left-wing politics, and uses this as a way of offering unexpected twists. She talks about how dreadful it was, developing breasts early—“shtetl titties,” she calls them—and being sexualized from a young age. She then pivots to how, in her 30s, she’s no longer gently patted in public spaces and how she misses this. That’s it, that’s the joke.
Then there’s the interlude where Glazer admonishes mainstream (non-feminist) pornography for its emphasis on incest. She digresses a bit and you think she’s about to condemn the 1995 movie Clueless for its step-sibling romance. Really, you think, she’s out here cancelling Clueless? Instead she mimes her then-pubescent self let us say really enjoying the film—and in doing so, going somewhere far franker than Clueless itself ever did.
I suppose a part of me reacted to the knowledge that Glazer doesn’t fully identify as a woman the way I would have had I learned that she no longer considered herself Jewish. (Note: she absolutely does consider herself Jewish; it’s an analogy.) Broad City was such a triumph of Jewish female representation that maybe I am, on some level, unjustly attached to the idea of its creators as female and as Jews.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
