Ilana Glazer‘s debut comedy special (The Planet Is Burning) helped jumpstart Prime Video’s Amazon Originals foray for stand-up comedy, coming just a few months after Jim Gaffigan kicked off Amazon’s strategy. Now, a month after Hulu picked Gaffigan to launch its Hulu Originals comedy brand, here comes Glazer once more. Only Glazer’s in a much different place in her life and career in 2024, and it shows.
The Gist: Onscreen, Glazer co-wrote and starred in the 2021 Hulu Original movie, False Positive, where she played a pregnant woman learning disconcerting facts about her fertility doctor. And earlier this year, she co-wrote and co-starred with comedian Michelle Buteau in the big-screen release, Babes, where she cracked wise and shed tears in equal measure as a would-be new mom.
Here onstage, filmed in Toronto, we get to the unvarnished truth of what it was really like for Glazer to become a mother in real-life, including the horrors of trying to film The Afterparty (the Apple TV+ which took place over the course of a single night) while going through all of the phases of her pregnancy.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a reason Glazer and Buteau had such great chemistry together onscreen in Babes this year, and if you love one, you’ll love the other.
Photo: Hulu
Memorable Jokes: We find out early on that the “human magic” in the title of this special refers to the process of becoming a mother. “I have been having a magical experience as a parent,” Glazer tells us. “And that magic for me began at conception.”
If you thought you knew a little bit about Glazer’s sex life, then you’ll find out you didn’t know nearly the half of it. She takes us through her timeline, from a jazz-loving, straight-haired schoolgirl who got no love or attention despite developing breasts at the age of 9, to learning to love to hate Emo boys, to how and why she “had never done it to completion with secretion” before she got pregnant. In between, we learn her thoughts on condoms “condoms are gross, fresh” and pulling out “pulling out is sex that becomes yoga.”
When she became pregnant, she was filming The Afterparty. That show’s continuity issues clashed with the natural evolution of her pregnancy: “It looked like I was having an allergic reaction over the course of the night.”
But nothing prepared Glazer for finding out at 37 weeks that her pregnancy had come with complications, not the least of which was finding out that one of her ob-gyn’s was a guy who boasted he was “my biggest fan.” The whole retelling of events prompts some funny sight gags from Glazer.
Her encounter at a Florida Airbnb, on the other hand, left too much to the imagination for Glazer.
A Brazzers bumper sticker will do that.
Our Take: One of Glazer’s Broad City scenes recently went viral on TikTok, five years after the Comedy Central series ended.
In it, Ilana tells Abbi that “in da clerb, we all fam.” In a lot of ways, still, you go to an Ilana Glazer stand-up performance to be in the club, part of her family.
So while there are a few moments where Glazer uncovers some deeper meaning to her observations — whether it’s in how we commonly accept “daddy issues” as an excuse for bad relationship decisions while disregarding the consequences for when a woman has deep-seated fractures with her mother; or in a hard pivot where Glazer expresses pride for her peers in the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America for their labor strikes in 2023, using it in an unexpected bridge to talk about how even mainstream Hollywood seems obsessed with incest — the majority of the time we spend in her company onstage isn’t so deep.
It may be something as simple as getting high on an edible while watching your toddler potentially choke to death, only for everything to work out perfectly fine on its own.
It may not be your perfect night. But it is for Glazer.
Our Call: As Hulu’s Hularious brand begins to take shape, take this opportunity to STREAM IT whether you already love Glazer or not, just to see what the algorithm suggests for you afterward.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
