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‘Broad City’: The early years
03.16.2015
07:28 pm
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If you bothered clicking on this link and are reading these words right now, then chances are fairly good that you and I have something in common: we’re both probably fans of the wonderfully loopy Comedy Central show Broad City, created by the very talented and very funny duo of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. Admittedly, though, the first episode… I didn’t get it. Then I watched another one—I was stoned—and then another and by the third one I was thinking that Ilana Glazer is probably one of the greatest natural comedians since… Gracie Allen. (Compare and contrast Glazer’s ditzy pothead Bodhisattva with Gracie’s holy fool in this (live) episode of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show where Gracie sees a psychiatrist and you’ll see why I say that. I’ll also add that I think “Ilana” is one of the best and most originally delineated comedy characters since Chris Elliot’s “Chris” in Get A Life or Julia Davis’ evil hairdresser “Jill Tyrell” in that bleakest of the bleak BBC sitcom Nighty Night).
 

 
Which is not to slight the presence of Abbi Jacobson, the straight woman of the Broad City partnership. Jacobson’s one of the best “reactors” working today—she’s as good as Martin Freeman in that department—and her character’s continuously foiled aspirations in life are some of the greatest examples of a comedy style I like to call “pathetica” in recent memory. Her passive, sighing, trying-to-be-a-good-sport reactions to things like being asked to clean up “puke” and “pubes” at work, the guy who she’s infatuated with wanting her to peg him, and any and all of the ridiculous schemes that Glazer’s character wants her to go along with, are pure gold. Without someone at least semi-reasonable to bounce off of, “Ilana” would simply appear to be a lunatic with no grounding in reality, but Jacobson is so real and her acting so understated that she ends up elevating everything to another level. It’s her “interpretation” of whatever’s happening—seeing the situation through her character’s eyes—that adds another onion skin layer of complexity of what transpires on Broad City. Great comedy is alchemical in nature and Broad City has exactly the right ingredients for greatness.
 

 
Broad City feels wholly organic—Glazer and Jacobson met taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade—and there’s nothing forced about their chemistry. The brilliant Hannibal Buress—Bill Cosby’s favorite person, NOT—is also a part of the cast as “Lincoln,” Ilana’s friend with benefits, a pediatric dentist.
 

 
If you’ve not discovered the indiscreet charms of Broad City yet, you should, it’s one of the very best comedies on TV today (it’s exec produced by one of America’s greatest Americans, Amy Poehler, surely a mark of distinction out of the gate). If you are a Broad City fan already and you’ve not checked out the Broad City web series that ran for several years on YouTube that led to the TV show, then you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Actually, it just seems like a lot, but the webisodes are pretty short—two to five minutes each—and you can just watch them one after another. They’re excellent, just like the show but… shorter. Each one has at least one huge laugh.
 

 
More early ‘Broad City’ and more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.16.2015
07:28 pm
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