Ilana Glazer is trying to think of films about pregnancy and early parenthood that aren’t told from a man’s perspective. “There’s Knocked Up, but that’s about Seth Rogen. And there’s Nine Months, but that’s about Hugh Grant. Three Men and a Baby cracks me up because it’s like, three?!” says the 37-year-old, with comically perfect levels of incredulity (cracking me up in the process).
Glazer – best known as co-creator of the seminal millennial sitcom Broad City – is making a serious point: there are outrageously few movies about birth and babies that centre on the female experience. The comedian’s attempt to rectify this, however, has taken the form of a distinctly unserious film: in fact, Babes has to be among the most viscerally funny depictions of motherhood ever created.
Babes follows Eden (Glazer), a free-spirited yoga teacher who falls pregnant after a one-night stand, turning to her best friend and fellow New Yorker Dawn (Michelle Buteau), a bruised and exhausted mother of two, for support. Yet layered over this sweet meditation on female friendship is a barrage of eye-wateringly hilarious riffs on the most mind-bending aspects of child-bearing, from the surreal misery of pumping to the dreaded intersection of birth and defecation. Babes is relentlessly wild and gross in one sense, but the events it portrays are also utterly routine. One thing soon becomes clear: the body comedy of motherhood is an inordinately rich and criminally neglected comic seam.
Glazer began writing Babes in 2021, based on an idea pitched by her agent, Susie Fox. It had been two years since Broad City ended, and the pair were brainstorming new projects. Fox – who, like Dawn, had two young children – was imagining what would happen if a close single friend unexpectedly found herself pregnant. What Fox didn’t know was that Glazer (who has been married to scientist David Rooklin since 2017) was expecting. Serendipitously, her writing partner Josh Rabinowitz was too.
The duo began crowdsourcing crazy stories about pregnancy and motherhood from their social circles, but were also very much writing from Eden’s “naively excited” perspective, says Glazer. “Having heard you lose some sleep but having no clue how deeply …” She pauses for a few seconds to unearth the right word, “effortful having children is”.
Babes is a shining example of what’s known in the trade as hard comedy – that is, the increasingly unusual business of cultivating actual belly laughs. The team’s mantra was “big comedy with big heart. Our north star references were Superbad and Bridesmaids”. Yet Babes is also stuffed with emotional truth. The film’s dramatic climax sees the pair have a fight, during which Dawn delivers a speech about the obliterating force of motherhood, something Fox told the expectant pair they had “no idea” about. “I was like: bitch, you write it,” Glazer recalls. “So [Fox] just word-vomits in an email and we then edit and curate it. But this raw honesty can only come from someone at the end of their fucking rope.” By the end of the writing process, Glazer and Rabinowitz – both by now parents themselves – “had definitely landed in Dawn’s seat”.
That said, Eden is a quintessential Glazer creation. In Broad City, the comedian played her half-namesake Ilana Wexler, a sex-mad stoner with sociopath levels of self-confidence. Eden – Babes’ madcap comic engine – shares many traits with her: both are spectacularly garrulous; unselfconsciously eccentric; and enthusiastic cheerleaders for their best pals. Then there is the real-life Glazer. Speaking over Zoom from her New York home (halfway through our conversation she reveals with sing-song panic that her phone is on 9% battery, but “it is going to be great!”), she’s a thrillingly familiar presence. Like her fictional selves, she embodies a kind of clownish apogee of American effusiveness, but one tempered by an earthy idiosyncrasy. Her on-screen love of ludicrous pronunciation is also clearly a genuine personality trait (today, “te-le-vis-i-on” has five syllables).
Glazer acknowledges the lines are blurred between herself and her characters – “There’s a continuation” – although intensive therapy has helped clarify the distinctions: “I have had to do a lot of work to understand the difference between Ilana Wexler and Ilana Glazer the private person, and Ilana Glazer the comedian, too.” Yet Glazer also believes that bringing oneself to a role is the key to comedic success. “As a forever comedy nerd,” she believes “you can smell when people are for real or not and truly themselves.”
There is one crucial difference between Glazer and her characters – a distinction that has been crucial to her ascension through the ranks of US comedy. Alongside director Pamela Adlon (creator-star of the exceptional single-parenting dramedy Better Things), Glazer’s goal with Babes was to make “an indie comedy that looked and felt like a studio comedy.” The resulting 25-day shoot was a “gruelling” exercise in time and budget restraints. It was also emotionally taxing: Glazer didn’t see her daughter “for days at a time. I’d leave before she got up and come home and just smell her.”
Yet as much as she would like more money for future projects – “to, you know, make things more humanely” – Glazer is aware that she thrives under pressure. “Broad City was low budget. This is what I’m used to and where my mania and OCD is so effective,” she says. Such intensity and over-thinking – “annoying in my personal life” – is “very useful in my professional life. There are constant fires [on set] and I can rattle off five solutions, then delegate people, then check-in to make sure it’s done. It’s where my athleticism comes out.”
This ruthlessly efficient productivity is not what you would associate with the protagonists of Broad City, which Glazer co-created with Abbi Jacobson as a self-funded web series in 2009. By 2014, it had begun a five-season run as a beloved and critically lauded sitcom (it was crowned ninth best TV show of the 2010s by Vanity Fair, and 96th best programme of the 21st century by this newspaper), chronicling the surreal slacker-style exploits of Wexler and Jacobson’s Abbi Abrams – a wannabe personal trainer whose shuddering awkwardness perfectly offset Ilana’s delusional swagger – as they meandered through New York City, their lives revolving around random, scrappy fun.
Glazer first met Jacobson at classes run by storied alternative comedy school the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, co-founded by Amy Poehler and a proving ground for the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Donald Glover and The Bear star Ayo Edebiri. Glazer and Jacobson bonded over what Glazer describes as a shared “bad bitch work rhythm that made us really commit to each other. Then we discovered all this comedic romance between us”. The contrast between their portrayal of directionless youth and the responsibility they held as show runners was “insane, Rachel, it was insane”, gasps Glazer. “My husband says I blacked out during Broad City and my unconscious mind got to be Ilana Wexler: freewheeling and pleasure-seeking.”
Glazer describes herself as “extremely anxious”. She pauses to laugh maniacally. The stress of helming a successful TV show meant “the fun on screen was the fun we couldn’t have”, and the series became a way to let off steam.
From the very start, anxiety and comedy were tightly intertwined for Glazer. As a child growing up on Long Island, she would spend hours making sketches alongside her older brother, Eliot, now also a TV writer. Glazer always knew she was funny, although “it took many years of therapy to understand what a defence mechanism it was. It wasn’t out of confidence, it was out of total social anxiety and insecurity. But I knew at least that I was a good performer.”
That bit is not up for debate: Glazer’s performances in Broad City and Babes are gleefully, uniquely hilarious. She recently rewatched the former with her husband, pleased to note it was still “so funny – we were dying”, but ultimately found it too overwhelming to finish even one episode. The show encompassed the most formative years of her life; after it concluded, Glazer struggled to process the end of that era. Nowadays, she feels “young Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are my babies, Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler are my babies”.
Combine that with another fictional child in the form of Eden (and Eden’s baby) – plus her actual daughter – and it seems comedy’s newest matriarch has quite the brood on her hands.
Babes is in cinemas from 9 August.
