Broad City Proved Women Could Be Just As Disgusting As Men (Finally)

By Dani Blum


In an episode early into the fourth season of Broad City, Ilana Wexler shits herself. She’s at a party in a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment, squeezed into a mesh leotard and wearing a neon orange wig. As she realizes what’s happened, she tosses a glass into the air and bounces over to her ex-boyfriend, murmuring oh no no as she backs into the washroom. The shit consumes the rest of the episode.


For Ilana and Broad City, a moment like this is organization as regular. Gross-out humor is cooked into the show’s formula. The series, which kicks off its final season tonight (January 24), was puffed and passed into the world first as a web series and then as a hit Comedy Central show. It revolves around its main characters, Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler, who function as alter-egos of the show’s creators, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. With each other, they rummage through New York, hunting for pot and air conditioning, and, more than once, pooping themselves. The show is a series of adventures punctuated by slapstick comedy. Farts erupt. Penises break. Shit happens — in a leotard, or in a shoe. Nevertheless the grossness is more than a ploy for a fast laugh. Bodily fluids are the show’s propulsive mucus.


Abbi Jacobson (left) and Ilana Glazer (right) in Season 4 of Broad City


I binge-watched Broad City immediately after I moved to New York last summer. It felt like studies. I can’t pinpoint the age I learned to be ashamed of my body, only that it was related to the shame of existing. I spent my freshman year of college squelching my flip flops as fast as I may across my dorm hallway so I might put on makeup soon after I showered. I look gross, I’ll still mention, warning my companions as soon as my hair’s unstraightened, my eyes unlined. Apologizing is automatic. It takes conscious task to stop.


Meanwhile, the show was, and still is, the most revolting I’ve seen females allowed to be on TV. It’s also among the most real. Abbi and Ilana seem like authentic characters, like more sped-up, absurd versions of the ladies in my sort chats. Piece of that lies in their grossness, and why communal it is: They share how disgusting they are together, and it’s so blasé, it feels radical. Obviously Abbi pees out a condom at her birthday dinner while Ilana’s skin swells from a shellfish allergy. Certainly Ilana spends 15 seconds extracting a plastic bag of pot that’s been wedged in her vagina — “It’s nature’s pocket,” she says matter-of-factly.


In the third season’s first sequence, Abbi and Ilana’s bathrooms are side-by-side in split screen as a gross tapestry of their routines unfolds. Over constant, building synths, they kiss negative pregnancy tests and then recoil at what just touched their mouths, burn their fingers on their respective straighteners (Abbi’s for her hair, Ilana’s for her pubes), and burble into bongs from their toilet seats because the rooms fill with smoke. Moments like this stitch with each other female friendships — we're gross with our best companions, because they’re the only ones we’re permitted to show it to. “I had never seen girls, like, pooping on TV,” a gentleman friend texted me recently about the show. Yet I can flick by way of the Comedy tab on Netflix and find a constant stream of boys spewing potty humor.


The starting sequence of Season 3


What strikes me most about Broad City’s disgusting scenes is that they come from a place of comfort. Abbi and Ilana have sex, yet they’re not sex objects. These females own their bodies — not in the way of corporate-branded empowerment, nevertheless as lumps they lug around that are some days pretty and often not. In Broad City, bodies are not only allowed to be messy; they’re allowed to be homes.


The show bombards you with grossness so much that the viewer gets desensitized; it becomes just background, or texture. Abbi and Ilana clearly don’t view each other, or themselves, as disgusting. They present themselves without shame. Because once everything’s disgusting, even the world around them, nothing really is.