From the long lost potato farms of Long Island to the Seinfeld-esque streets of New York City, siblings Ilana and Eliot Glazer having been using their lives as fodder for their autobiographical humor since the late 1980s. Luckily, the internet came along to help them bring their sense of weird to the world, and with the success of their combined web series portfolio (Broad City, Eliot's Sketchpad, It Gets Betterish, Chronic Gamer Girl, My Parents Were Awesome, Shit New Yorkers Say) it seems the world is paying close attention.
IG You’ve got a hole in your crotch. EG I know Ilana. WN Where are you guys from originally? IG Oh we’re doing it. EG Beautiful, beautiful Long Island. We’re from a town called St. James, it’s in a larger suburb called Smithtown. WN So it’s like an hour or two away? EG It’s two hours east of the city for the most part. IG It’s potato farmers' grandchildren. EG There are farmers there, and horses, and it’s really pretty, but it’s also by the beach so there’s some beachyness to it. There’s some surfers. It’s very Italian cuz it’s Long Island. It’s a little Asian, it’s a little Jewish. It’s a really strange cross section of everything you could find everywhere else on Long Island in dense pockets. WN So you must have gotten a pretty diverse sense of the world. EG No. IG Not at all. EG Because it’s so Italian. IG Very conventional Catholic. EG It's so macho. IG First of all, I want to say, succinctly, it’s where guidos meet potato farmers’ grandchildren. White people, people who are only around white people, notice these shades of white but they don’t realize it goes all the way to dark. It’s like everybody is, “Oh you’re Italian.” EG We had no diversity in high school. It’s a shame actually since it’s a public school. WN And so close to New York City. IG You would think that people would be more open but because we’re so close to New York they feel threatened and they are willfully ignorant. EG Yea, I didn’t realize til after college that it was a Republican town. I thought it was a very Democratic, progressive town because of our parents and because of our friends. I had no idea until the election of 2004. IG The 2nd Bush. Weren’t you out of college at that point? EG No, I was in college, but being in college is enough to be enlightened in politics. WN Where did you go to school? EG New York University. But even just being in the city is enough, and it’s like, holy shit, these people are conservative and Republican. IG Which it doesn’t always have to be together. EG That’s why I’m saying conservative AND Republican. Like wait, if these people knew I was gay they’d actually give a shit. It’s crazy. I never would have expected that. ...I was in the city a lot as a kid, I was always coming in on the weekend with friends. IG Our parents took us. We didn’t play sports, we did plays. EG Plays and museums. IG And we had Eliot who’s so neurotic and needs to see it all laid out, he used to tack up the playbills on our basement wall. [Our interview is interrupted when Eliot’s cellphone rings. The ringtone is Meredith Chapman’s “Bitch.”] IG So gay. So, we just had a wall full of playbills, that was like, our thing. EG And our maternal grandparents were very integral to our life, and they were incredibly classy, educated, cultured people so they always made sure we were going to museums and the ballet and exhibits and plays and musicals. IG They were so cool. EG So yea, the city was very much second nature to us. IG But it was also this big, beautiful thing that we always wanted to be in. We felt like we were in the sewage, the cultural sewage draining from New York. We felt it, we knew it. I went to NYU too because when I saw Eliot going I was like yep, mmm hmm, right here. But when I got into NYU this woman was like, “When you go there, don’t get tainted” and it’s like, you mean believe in equality for for all people? Don’t get tainted? EG Don’t expand my horizons? IG Don’t turn gay. Don’t date someone who’s not white, please. EG Well everything goes back to race with Ilana, to be fair. IG No it doesn’t, it goes back to gender and race and socioeconomic status. I think it’s more of a general concern of rules that are thrust upon us. EG I agree, I just think you might have to consider some more aspects of it. When you think of these people telling you not to get tainted I think it’s more than them just saying, “Don’t date a black guy.” IG Whatever, we’re arguing the same side. WN You guys have your own dynamic. EG Yea our family meals are always like, “Huh?” because we squawk at each other, but there’s nothing but love there. We’re the most functional, happy family and always have been. WN It’s the Long Island way to communicate. IG Yea, it’s like absolute transparency. There's no privacy, which sucks. And there's no individuality, as in, our parents compare us fucking constantly. But when we’re like, the four of us, it’s like unit, unit, unit. EG The only other people that I know like that are New Yorkers and Jews IG I feel like my policy with my art and personality is I just want total transparency, and I think I’m not afraid of that because of the way we grew up. Even though it’s scary, I’ve always pushed myself to be real honest with our parents and, like, they just accept it with open fucking arms, so I’m not really afraid in an audience situation. WN Do you guys feel like a unit yourselves? IG Oh yea. WN Because you're doing similar things? IG Well we started off doing stuff together, then we branched off and we’ve been mostly doing stuff solo right now. How are we not a unit, you know? People see us as a unit and we promote each others' stuff so we’re always linked, but I consider us a team. When we were kids the main thing that we did like 85% of the time was film sketches, and we have a grotesque amount of footage. But the fact that we have that type of continuity in our lives, something that was, like, born that early and has come to this adult version, is crazy. I’m just so grateful. EG I finally just got them all transferred and, I would venture to say hundreds of hours of footage. WN Do you remember the first one? EG Our Grandpa on our maternal side, as a grown adult, made his own videos. He did a newscast and he had the graphic on a big sketch pad and he wrote K-R-A-P TV, so, like, that was the joke, and he did a funny news cast on a video. We grew up like that and immediately were like, oh yea, gotta do that. IG Eliot is also exactly like my Grandpa. EG So when we got the video camera I started making K-R-A-P TV stuff and that was our channel, and we were always filming sketches on the channel. IG And then our second channel was GBS, Glazer Broadcasting System. We were playing this game all the time that we owned a TV station and that it was a 24-hour TV station. There's one where Eliot with a little shag, which is not quite a mullet but like a duck tail gelled, and giant glasses, and he’s like, ‘Hi I’m Eliot Glazer, I’m the Big Cheese of K-R-A-P TV.” He was, like, idiot savant, autistic with this shit—it was genius. But also like, this kid needs some ADHD medicine. WN What is the idea for you guys as far as being successful at comedy? Is there a threshold? EG There's something to be said about achieving a certain level of fame. Not like I wanna be a movie star, but like, I wanna be a writer/performer/producer/whatever, or comedy auteur who is recognized and appreciated for his work. Essentially it’s like wanting to be part of the cool kids' club. WN So when Shit New Yorkers Say got 100,000 views did you guys go out and have drinks and celebrate? IG My celebration is staying home and sleeping. EG My celebration is getting a good cookie, but there’s a certain satisfaction to being recognized for it. IG This is Eliot speaking for Eliot. EG Yea for Shit New Yorkers Say and for It Gets Betterish, it’s being recognized for something that connected with people and that people always say, “It’s so funny, I forwarded it to all my friends.” That’s a very surreal thing, to have someone say, “I love this product you made so much, it speaks to me so much, I’m sharing you with other people.” IG I just want to move to, like, Fort Greene. WN That's your dream location ? IG Yea, right now. But, like, it’s really, like, money for me. I feel like I‘m figuring out my voice. How I can compromise between what I want to do and what’s palatable to people. I just wanna be a fucking baller. And I want to like do so many things with my money, like odd, weird, shit. Like when I’m older, I wanna fund research that I wanna know the answers to. I wanna like, make a fucking women's shelter. I wanna like, revolutionize advertising where I get to the point where I can be the face of something and every time I’m the face of something I make a deal with them, with the brand, where it’s like, you give whatever percent of proceeds to such and such if I give the money you’re giving to me to such and such. I think that charity thing would make something sell better, make people feel. I have this idea about this business model I guess, of making a video and having a company pledge that they’ll do a dollar per view to the charity of your choice. And I don't believe that every dollar that you put in a charity goes to, like, some African child, but Ashton Kutcher did this thing where however much someone tweets, he got mosquito nets. That’s such a cleaner, you know, supply and demand. Like, there’s a need somewhere for that. I just wanna do that. Where it’s some clear thing that an area needs right now. That’s like, my weird goal. I want, not just money, but I want, like, power. But I also want fucking money. I wanna, like, buy my parents a vacation, you know? I wanna, like, see nice shoes that Eliot would look good in and buy them for him. That’s fucking dope. “Hey what size are you?” That’s fucking hot. I wanna do that shit. I want money. EG Financially, I just want to buy a house, a small house or a medium-sized house and have an infinity pool. That’s all I want is an infinity pool. Having a pool, to me, is making it. And I must say, on an episode of House Hunters these people were shopping in, like, Fort Lauderdale, this couple, and they went to 3 houses and one of them had a pool that was this egg shaped pool with, like, palm trees and they were like, “We don't need it” and I was like “What the fuck is wrong with you?” They chose a more expensive house without a pool—blew my mind. You could be like Daddy Warbucks if you have a pool, as far as I’m concerned. WN Was there a point when comedy was a side thing? IG Oh yea, totally. So first of all, the second I could make money when I was 14, I wanted to. This little diner job gave me fucking diarrhea and nightmares but I, like, just loved making money, it just made me feel so validated, so I never stopped working once I could. I started comedy in college, so that was like my day job, and then I would babysit and waitress and this and that, and then when I graduated I waitressed for a while and did comedy at night, then I got an office job. EG She waitressed at the grossest place. IG I remember I gave my six weeks notice to the office job when I found out Amy [Poehler] was going to be in the finale [of Broad City]. My writing partner had made a big chunk of money from an art thing and had quit—we worked together. I didn’t even know that Amy was gonna produce it, I just had this fucking feeling where I was like, OK, this is the tipping point—I’m gonna do whatever it takes. I’ve been saving my money since I’m fucking 14 and I never traveled with it, even though i wanted to, but I was saving it for something. Turned out I was saving it for the LA trip, and living off of it for a bit when we sold the script deal to FX. WN What’s your connection to Amy Poehler again? IG Someone at UCB owed us a favor, cuz he was supposed to direct an episode [of Broad City]. WN Which is where you guys used to have a show, right? EG We were performers there. IG Did you know she founded the theater? WN I did know that. IG She’s really on top of her shit. She knows who’s hot on the scene, who’s making videos, if someone’s getting big. So we asked this guy, “Can you ask Amy?” She had already heard of it. She was like, “I love Broad City of course, I would love to!” And we were like what the fuuuuuuck. Filming went well, we wrote her an email thanking her so much, quick so that it wasn't taking up her time. She wrote back the nicest email and we were like, OK we’re gonna fucking ask her to be Executive Producer. We know she’s so fucking busy, but we have to at least ask. We emailed her saying thanks so much for making it special, we know you’re the busiest person in the world, but if you wanted to do this with us, it would be a fucking dream. But, you know, no pressure, blah, blah, blah—and then she did. So we were like OK, now we have this extra element, and we went out [to Los Angeles] for August and September [to pitch Broad City]. But about a month or so ago FX passed on moving forward, so we are out again re-pitching.
WN What did you study in college? EG I studied a mix of things. I went to the Individualized School of Studies, so I could create my own major. IG Psych and Child Psych. EG I actually went to school on a singing scholarship cuz I can sing, but then I was like, I don’t wanna do it. IG He has an incredible, incredible voice. WN What’s your go-to audition song? EG Oh, I don’t have audition songs—Climax by Usher. At the time I had been blogging on my own personal blog and the whole blogging scene began to take shape around that time, so I was trying to leverage that in some way. The goal was to be like, linked-to on Gawker basically, and I got that. WN What was your blog called? EG Fast Hugs. It was, like, stories, New York stuff, pop culture, gay stuff, music, everything basically. WN It sounds like comedy in your writing always goes back to the idea of transparency. EG Absolutely, it’s all very reciprocal. It’s been a little difficult for me to come to terms with that, the idea that my professional writing in any way relates to stand up comedy or storytelling or sketch comedy, it’s always been a struggle for me to close that circle. IG In your own mind. EG Right. And admit that those things do mirror each other, or have effects on each other. I like to compartmentalize and say, “Well, don’t talk about my day job if I’m performing here.” IG Your day job is so hot. EG I just like to keep them separate, but now I realize it’s not really something to be kept separate because somebody will introduce me at a show with “his book” and “his blog” or “Shit New Yorkers Say” or “It Gets Betterish” and “he writes for Vulture” and it’s like, it’s all the same thing. IG And it’s all the same place, it’s all Eliot Glazer. EG It’s just a little intimidating because it’s a new model to be like, I’m doing everything! I’m doing all these things! It’s a little bit of a mental struggle to come to terms with the idea of being as good as somebody else who considers themselves just a comedy writer, whereas I feel like, I guess I’m in journalism? And does one limit the other? WN Are you less of a comedy writer because you’re all these other things? EG Exactly. But Ilana’s really taught me everything is all one big brand. WN What is the goal for you? EG Obviously everyone is trying to be Louis C.K. and it would be great to be that kind of comedy auteur. IG What’s an auteur? EG Like an all encompassing person whose art is their job, like Louis C.K. or Lena Dunham. Someone who’s semi-auto. I mean, it’s a very specific niche now thanks to Larry David. Someone whose loose interpretation of their life is now a TV show. A sophisticated, well received, widely watched comedy that’s part of the cultural zeitgeist and, you know, these people are treated like philosopher kings in a sense. WN So ‘truth in comedy’ meaning finding an ultimate truth that everyone can understand, not a truth of yourself necessarily. WN One last question. I was going through YouTube comments and I came across one on a Broad City post that describes Ilana as “Stacked... IG ...Stacked like a pile of pancakes!” Girl you stacked like a pile of paaancaaakes! EG What does that mean?! WN It got me thinking, how would you guys describe yourselves? A lot of your life is selling yourself when you’re a comedian. What’s the pitch? Who is Ilana and who is Eliot? EG I’m literally doing this already for an It Gets Betterish pitch, but writing Eliot Grazner so it’s like, a bit removed. I guess sophisticated man-child. IG I would say stoner chick. Stoner bitch? Empathetic. I would say, yea, stoner bitch. EG Slash young Black Panther in the making. IG I would just say stoner bitch. EG Yea, sophisticated man baby and stoner bitch. IG Do you know how you would describe yourself? EG You can’t ask the interviewer that. IG Why not? I just did.
After this interview, the pilot for Ilana's web series Broad City was picked up by Comedy Central.
ILANA GLAZER | ilanaglazer.com ELIOT GLAZER | eliotglazer.com
PHOTOS: MEGHAN MCGARRY | WORDS: KELLY SHERMAN
