'Broad City' Is Back, Exploding With Great Gags
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are back for another season of deeply satisfying, gleefully vulgar slapstick and cultural commentary, as Broad City returns for a third season on Comedy Central Wednesday night.
The season premiere opens with a bravura sequence: A split-screen shot of Abbi and Ilana in the bathrooms of their respective New York City apartments. In a series of jump cuts, we watch them spend a year in that tiny room — a no dialogue display of how to use that cramped place with a toilet as a site for all sorts of extra-curricular activities. The scene is Broad City’s triumphant announcement that it’s back, bursting the confines of space with every aspect of life that the show is capable of presenting.
Jacobson and Glazer defy the usual portrayals of friendship on television. Each is an independent agent who never doubts the other’s loyalty, yet neither is ever reduced to guilt-tripping neediness or easy-joke squabbling. They seize upon the most ordinary New York situations: the premiere is basically about the duo sitting around at an outdoor café planning to attend an art gallery opening, Ilana losing the key to her bicycle security chain, and Abby having to buy a shirt for the gallery event.
Yet within those parameters, there’s an explosion of dialogue that never succumbs to mere jokes-and-punchlines, but rather gets its laughs from its rhythmic flow, often a private language between the two that we feel privileged to witness. (In this, they’re more like a two-person version of the Marx Brothers than they are any other contemporary comedians.)
As the series has proceeded, the team has grown ever-more bold in the scale of their slapstick. A new high point for Broad City is reached in a sequence in which Abbi, desperate to urinate, gets trapped in a construction-site port-o-potty, which is immediately followed by Ilana getting accidentally hooked to the rear of a large delivery truck as it speeds off, Ilana attached, Abbi following on foot. It’s like a first-rate silent-film scene.
Next week, Abbi and Ilana trade identities in a daffily surreal sketch set in a Brooklyn food co-op. The precision of the details — the way Broad City lets you think it’s meandering while remaining laser-focused on the timing of the gags and hitting a hilarious crescendo — is a wonder to behold.
Broad City airs Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.
