Those first two minutes of the third-season premiere are as close to a mission statement as Jacobson and Glazer have ever gotten. Their characters are goofy, relatable, angst-free, gleefully hedonistic and anatomically obsessed. You couldn’t find that montage anywhere else on
"I guarantee I can identify my own butthole in a lineup," Ilana assures Abbi with benign braggadocio at the beginning of episode two. Her self-love has always been exaggerated for laughs: An episode last season was devoted to Ilana’s infatuation with a doppelganger (played by Alia Shawkat), and her masturbation routine includes getting gussied up for herself in lipstick and
Glazer and Jacobson obviously aren’t the first female comedians to discuss their bodies. But they are pioneering a kind of fuck-it feminism about body shame that feels distinctly new. They’re a lot less coy and self-consciously button-pushing about physiology than, say, Sarah Silverman, whose Comedy Central series emphasized her tomboyish cuteness and her more juvenile toilet preoccupations, which ultimately attributed bathroom concerns to arrested development. (Silverman’s “Poop Song,” for instance, is a children’s song performed with a child.)
For Broad City’s channel-mate Inside Amy Schumer, the body isn’t so much an object of fascination as a battlefield where men fight with women for control. Schumer's show is often an anatomy of female bodily self-loathing; one sexting skit finds Schumer’s character singing to herself “Somebody’s really pretty today,” but then the gay male photographer she's hired to take professional selfies for her says of her pubic hair, “It looks like [you’ve] got a Hasidic rabbi living in [your] underpants.” Schumer’s feel-bad character is so worried she’s doing the wrong thing that she could never summon the untroubled present-in-the-body-ness to sing, “I shit, I shit,” while playing the maracas like Ilana does.
Lena Dunham’s Girls is perhaps the closest to Broad City in its milieu and its focus on the body. But the more overtly political HBO series, like Inside Amy Schumer, seems to be responding to the male gaze — in Dunham’s case, by challenging ideas about what is considered “worth seeing.” (Exhibit A: Dunham’s real-person-ish body having sex, dancing on ecstasy, sitting around in Hannah’s apartment and whatever else people do with theirs.) Though it takes place in the same parts of Brooklyn, Broad City occupies a different universe where sexual deviance might garner an
None of this makes those other shows any less urgent or necessary. But Broad City dashes away the male gaze entirely. It normalizes and plays around with
That utopian freedom is Broad City’s most powerful contribution to pop- culture feminism. Abbi and Ilana’s world