Ilana Glazer Got Better at Stand-up

If the only stand-up comedy specials you’d ever watched came out in 2024, you might think there are only two kinds: ones that are about being a parent, and ones that are about never being a parent. Are you the kind of comic who’s figured out how to talk about your kids without seeming like you just walked out of a Jim Belushi sitcom, or the kind who’s had to defend your choice not to continue your family name? You have to decide, dammit, DECIIIIIIIIDE. 

If you haven’t checked in with Ilana Glazer in a while, you might be surprised and possibly even a little alarmed to learn that they’ve ended up on the parent side of the divide. But the most astonishing trick in their new special, Human Magic — considering that it opens with a joke about sleep deprivation causing them cognitive decline — is how much parenthood has coincided with a notable sharpening of their comic focus.

If you know Ilana Glazer, it’s probably not as a comic, but as an actor. With Abbi Jacobson, they co-created the web series Broad City, which the pair then adapted as a sitcom for Comedy Central, in which they co-starred for five seasons in the mid- to late aughts. Glazer also starred in the 2017 feature comedy Rough Night, from past Broad City writers and future Hacks co-creators Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs. The Broad City talent pool also includes Anthony King, a co-showrunner on AppleTV+’s comic mystery The Afterparty, the first season of which co-starred Glazer as a guest/murder suspect at the titular event. Glazer is also prolific as a writer and producer. They won a Best Musical Tony in 2022 for producing A Strange Loop, and wrote and starred in the feature comedy Babes earlier this year. By any measure, this is a very accomplished person who has achieved major accolades working in the entertainment industry.

Successful comedic actors often get (or take) the opportunity to try out stand-up comedy; their fame permits them to fill venues with warm, receptive audiences. Think Joel McHale, Jeremy Piven and Ricky Gervais. (Stormy Daniels almost fits in this category, though the work she’s most famous for isn’t exactly comedic in nature.) Glazer had done some stand-up comedy in their early years, but their first special, 2020’s The Planet Is Burning, suggests that those muscles had gotten a bit flabby. A collection of premises that stop at clapter instead of culminating in a joke, Burning is a tiresome slog. Paste’s Claire Martin suggested that Glazer was too famous to be funny; even Broad City fans who said they really wanted to like it had to admit they didn’t. 

I didn’t either, so I was dreading Human Magic, which dropped on Hulu today. But as much as it pains me to say as a childless feminist, Glazer’s parenthood has given them something to say that’s worth listening to. Whereas Burning had perfunctorily touched on topics that seemed to have been shaken straight from a bag of Millennial Magnetic Poetry keywords — the Diva Cup, how sus it is that homophobes are actually thinking about “gay shit” constantly, that government officials are trying to kill us all through climate inaction because they’re about to die themselves — nothing could be more specific or personal than Glazer taking us through their parenthood journey. We learn about the baby’s conception (they’d never done it “raw dog whole hog” until they were trying to get pregnant, and it turns out it feels really good); the way their body changed during pregnancy (the growth of their breasts through the season of The Afterparty made it look like they were having an allergic reaction); how they DIYed shifting the fetus when, a few weeks before Glazer’s due date, it was in a breech position (an ass-up viewing of Aladdin is involved); what it was like when a resident told Glazer he was their biggest fan (“...and now you’re gonna see my pussy?”); to the baby’s birth — the human magic that gives the special its title. 

Now the baby is a toddler, so the story goes on from there. Like a Mafia boyfriend, she hates it when Glazer wears their hair pulled back (“My hair doesn’t do ‘long.’ You like it wide?”); being a verbose stoner was the perfect preparation for Glazer to keep up chatter with a young child, narrating their days together; that “daddy issues” are hot, but “issues with your mother” is a psychological diagnosis. The story about renting a Florida Airbnb for a visit to Glazer’s parents, which comes late in the special, has a hilariously horrifying payoff that may have you swearing off random vacation rentals forever. 

Along the way, we get digressions — Glazer’s experiences not having sex in high school thanks to their badly straightened hair and enthusiasm for jazz band; the difference between “guys” and “men”; that Glazer’s husband, a literal PhD, doesn’t know how to buy himself a shirt online — but Glazer’s new parenthood gives the special the cohesive narrative throughline Burning lacked.

There are still moments when Glazer succumbs to their worst comic instincts. A bit about the New York skyline being a giant dick-measuring contest feels as old as, well, the skyline itself. As for a gag about the physical similarities between a microphone and a penis, and Glazer’s wish to perform using one shaped like a pair of “titties”: I resent being put in a position to fact-check a joke based on physics and engineering. But overall, Human Magic represents a huge leap forward from where we saw Glazer last as a comic. 

Or maybe the season just makes me more of a mark for this kind of sleight of hand.