Abbi Jacobson

EO

You were writing and performing and building a career while simultaneously figuring yourself out throughout your late twenties. It felt like we were growing up alongside you. Were you conscious that you were negotiating your own desires in real time?

AJ

I don’t think I was figuring anything out or questioning anything at the time, actually. That’s what’s fascinating to me now. One of the biggest realizations I’ve had getting older is that I grew up incredibly focused on other people. I grew up observing. My therapist calls it “tea leaf reading.” I was always looking for clues, trying to assess how everyone else felt, trying to understand what everyone else wanted, without really asking myself what I felt or what I wanted. That part came very late to me.

It wasn’t a negotiation in the way you’re describing because I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Honestly, I wish I had known earlier that I was interested in women too. I went to art school. That would’ve been such an expansive thing to know about myself.

EO

But if you change that, you change the timeline for everything.

AJ

It’s so much a part of me now and the work that I do. It’s part of the characters I’m drawn to create. It’s all of it.

EO

I think that’s what made the show so immediately affecting. It felt live because you weren’t telling us your politics so much as embodying them through storytelling. There was a confidence to the specificity of the world you and Ilana built that made it feel deeply personal without ever feeling didactic.

AJ

I think when you’ve suddenly been given the opportunity to platform ideas that matter to you, the instinct is just, “Let’s get this done.” Broad City was incredibly specific to the bubble we were living in, to being that age in New York and trying to figure out friendship and work and community and who you were becoming. Those were the questions we were interested in. Over time, they naturally expanded outward into larger questions about structures, systems, and the world around us.

It is true what I said on Good Hang with Amy Poehler about meeting Ilana. She’s such an innate questioner. She’d constantly be like, “What the fuck is this? That’s not how this works. Why does it run this way?” I think I’d spent most of my life adapting to the world instead of questioning it. Being around someone who challenged every assumption completely changed the way I moved through it.

EO

That’s actually what I found myself recognizing watching it back. It felt like she made you safe enough to become present in your own life.

AJ

Yeah. I think that’s true. I see that more now than I did then.

EO

Part of what I’m trying to get at here is the larger context of the moment you emerged. You got to grow up in public to an extent, no? When I think back to that period, I think about Broad City, Girls, Parks and Recreation, the SNL ecosystem...

AJ

And then there was that whole Comedy Central class. Key & Peele, Nathan for You, and Kroll Show…

EO

Everybody occupied their own lane, but somehow those lanes all spoke to one another through the shared language of comedy. It was such a fertile moment for auteur-driven comedy. More than that, it almost felt like comedy was driving culture. Shows and films weren’t trying to be everything to everyone. They were allowed to be deeply specific and find their audience. Did it feel that way from the inside? Did you realize you were participating in a particular cultural moment while it was happening?

AJ

It was completely inside out. Broad City came from us talking and walking and getting coffee and existing together in New York. It never felt external to us. It wasn’t, “What does television need?” It was, “What is our dynamic and why does it make us laugh?” Our relationship to the city was part of that too. We were both really attentive to what parts of New York we loved and what parts of New York we absolutely hated. The city was always in conversation with us. It wasn’t a backdrop. It was part of the joke.

I think with Girls, you were getting one version of New York. Greenpoint apartments and beautiful interiors and certain kinds of lives. Broad City was about your friend living in Astoria and your other friend living in South Slope and realizing you have to take two trains and a bus to get there. It was about how fucking hot it is underground in August. The city was always pressing itself into the story because that’s what living in New York actually feels like.

EO

The environment becomes part of the improv. The heat becomes part of the scene. The subway delay becomes a character. The city itself is constantly asking questions of the characters.

AJ

Totally. You’re always asking what’s happening to these people emotionally and then what’s happening to them environmentally at exactly the same time. Sometimes New York was the obstacle and sometimes it was the engine.

EO

Everybody occupied their own lane because you were making the thing for yourselves first. It feels very different now. Shows are expected to be for everyone before they even exist.

AJ

At least in television, it feels like your show is expected to be for everyone, which is impossible. A streaming show is expected to hit this impossible target. Whereas we were allowed to make our thing for the people who loved our thing. It didn’t need to be watched by everybody. In the beginning we were writing for ourselves and our friends. There wasn’t an audience in mind. It was just, “Let’s make ourselves laugh.” That was how our writers’ room worked. If it tickled us, we’d put it in. And if there was something we really wanted to say, we’d Trojan horse it into the comedy. It was never, “The audience wants more romance,” or “We should do this because people want it.” We also weren’t working somewhere that was focus testing everything. There wasn’t a mandate.

When I later made A League of Their Own, it was such a different experience. More money, more problems. Amazon couldn’t have been more different than Comedy Central. It felt like testing a product. TV is such a collaborative art form. But imagine walking into a painter’s studio and saying, “We’ve tested how long people stand in front of paintings in museums, and this is what people want. So stop doing that.” It just feels completely antithetical to finding something original.

EO

It starts to feel like product testing instead of just making something you wholeheartedly believe in. There’s a response from an interview you and Ilana did with Elliot Page for Interview back in 2016 that I’ve never been able to shake. You said:

“When we started making the web series, it came out of feeling very powerless in becoming what we wanted to become, not being able to get parts or get seen or heard as a performer or comedian. We both found ourselves in this spot where, when you want to make something like this, you have no other option but to go full-force or not at all. And that's why we did it. It's a weird thing. Energy can't be created or destroyed, right? That energy must have been in us. You just have to gather it. That's what agency is. Everybody has will—you just have to gather it. And I guess you choose where your inspiration comes from and give yourself that permission.”

That also feels very close to agency as a practice.

AJ

I have to say, I think that sounds more like Ilana than me.

EO

Really?

AJ

I think that specific phrasing sounds more like something she would say. But I agree with it.

EO

What strikes me reading it back now is that it doesn’t actually feel like it’s about Broad City. It feels like a philosophy of making things. You just used the painter metaphor. Making art is an energy transfer too. You’re pulling from all these different experiences and references and encounters and somehow turning them into a painting, a show, a script, and a character.

So maybe let’s start at the end and work backwards. How do you feel about Broad City now?

AJ

It’s funny because hearing you read that quote back to me feels weirdly timely. When your email came through and we finally got this scheduled, one of my first thoughts was honestly, “Do they really want to talk to me?” I've been working constantly but I haven’t put anything out into the world in a while. Nothing has been made. Everything exists as scripts and projects and ideas and things in development. People can’t really look at my work right now because most of it technically doesn’t exist yet.

But one of the things I’m working on right now is very much about that energy. It’s about saying fuck the system a little bit because the system isn’t really working for me anymore.

EO

Break that down for me.

AJ

A League of Their Own was the last show I made as a creator. It came out in 2022. We got picked up for another season, wrote the entire second season, and then it got cancelled before we ever got to shoot it during the strikes in 2023. Since then I’ve actually been really lucky. I’ve been paid to write pilots that I’ve pitched myself. Those are great jobs and incredible opportunities. Projects get through development, notes, and all these different channels, and then they stop before they materialize. There are gatekeepers in television and there are people who decide what receives money and what gets made, and I can't simply go make a half-hour television show myself.

I’ve written two pilots I really love, a comedy and an hour-long drama. I’ve written two features entirely for myself. I’ve felt incredibly creative over the last few years, maybe more creative than ever, but it exists in this strange liminal state where the work is alive and the ideas are alive and none of it can actually cross over into existence.

EO

I wonder if you’re just one of those people who has to build the thing yourself.

AJ

I’m realizing that if I want to star in a show, I have to write the show. And I think that’s where my head is returning now. Broad City started from that exact feeling. We made thirty-five web episodes before we ever wrote a pilot. It was completely grassroots and completely DIY. It came from exactly that quote you read back to me earlier. We couldn’t get agents. We weren’t getting auditions. We didn’t get onto the teams we wanted to be on. So we made the thing ourselves.

I met Ilana in 2007. Broad City premiered when I was thirty. That’s almost a decade between beginning and arrival.

EO

Okay, now we’re dancing. Can you walk me through the years between arriving in New York and Broad City premiering?

AJ

I moved to New York in 2006 after graduating from MICA in Baltimore. I was twenty-two. I moved to attend the Atlantic Theater Company’s conservatory because I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a dramatic actor, but I lasted one week. I hated it. I truly hated it. I had a breakdown and immediately thought, “I’m not a real actor. I’m not built for this.” My roommate at the time suggested I go see something at Upright Citizens Brigade.

EO

Where did the impulse to be an actor come from?

AJ

In art school I made a lot of video work built around characters. They were projected on gallery walls and lived inside the context of contemporary art, so people read them as performance art or video installation, but really I was doing comedy. There was dramatic stuff in there too, but mostly it was me trying to figure out how to perform.

EO

Who helped you understand that impulse? Who were the bridges?

AJ

I was technically a general fine arts major. I focused mostly on drawing and painting and made these aerial landscape paintings. But I happened to be at school during the first year that they introduced a video minor, so I took a lot of film classes and video classes and started gravitating in that direction.

People like Cindy Sherman were definitely in the mix. Sherman especially because I was taking photography classes and became interested in performance through photography and images. But honestly it was also Saturday Night Live. It was this weird collision of the two. I always felt like the art world took itself very seriously. Years later I hosted A Piece of Work, my podcast with MoMA, which was built around that exact idea: that people walk into museums feeling like they needed to understand everything or possess the correct language before they were allowed to have an experience with art. I wanted people to feel like they could trust their own instincts first and let curiosity lead the experience. My teachers were probably the biggest influence, though. They showed us so much work and encouraged play. A lot of my video pieces were literally just me talking directly into a camcorder in 2004, which honestly feels very close to what people now do naturally through social media.

EO

So what finally got you through the doors at UCB?

AJ

I had wanted to be on Saturday Night Live so badly as a kid, but eventually I sort of gave up on it. Who becomes an actor? Who becomes a comedian? It didn’t feel like a real thing people actually got to do. Both of my parents are artists in different ways and my older brother is a graphic designer, which somehow felt more practical, even though going to art school and becoming a painter is objectively not practical at all.

When I moved to New York and got into Atlantic, I thought maybe I could do this, and then after that first week I thought, “Absolutely not.” I was devastated. I felt completely heartbroken and completely convinced that I wasn't built for that version of the work. I wasn't going to UCB because I thought it would change my life. My roommate kept saying, “Just go see a show. I think you'll like this theater.” When I finally went, it was genuinely one of those holy shit moments. But it wasn’t some grand pivot where I thought, “This is my new career now.”

I was working at Anthropologie. Everything from Broad City is true. I went by myself and I’d never seen improv like that before. More than anything, it felt like a community. It felt like laughter as a value system.

EO

What did that feel like in your body?

AJ

I just remember thinking, “I want to be here all the time. I want to watch this and I want to be on that stage.” From that point on I started taking classes whenever I could afford them. If it was my birthday or a holiday, I’d ask my parents for an improv class. They were once a week, from six to nine at night: Improv 101, then Improv 201, then the next one after that. I just kept going through the program and eventually started forming practice groups outside of class.

That’s where I met Ilana. That’s where I met Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello, who wrote and directed Broad City and now make Hacks. Chris Kelly was there. Zach Woods was my first improv teacher. Looking back it’s kind of insane how many of those people are now everywhere writing and acting and directing.

EO

Did it feel like you were entering a serious ecosystem? Did you understand that you were arriving in a moment?

AJ

There were definitely generations there. It’s Amy Poehler’s theater. Amy and the other Upright Citizens Brigade founders were already legends in that space, and there was this older generation of performers who had come the pipeline into Saturday Night Live and television.

You could go to a Sunday night show and see Seth Meyers or Rachel Dratch pop in. So there was a sense that if you were good enough, there was a trajectory.

But honestly I knew pretty quickly that I wasn’t the obvious choice in the room. If you had asked people in my early classes who was going to make it, I don’t think anyone would’ve pointed at me.

EO

What led you to feel that way?

AJ

Mostly that everyone seemed so confident and I wasn’t. I didn’t really have confidence in any part of my life back then. I eventually found it, but at the time I just felt insecure all the time. What I did have was obsession. I studied the format and form. I went to shows religiously. I interned at the school and worked the front desk on Saturday mornings just so I could be around it as much as possible. I remember Donald Glover teaching a sketch class in the conference room while I sat at the desk outside. He was also writing on 30 Rock at the time. Moments like that happened constantly, all the time.

EO

Did it feel affirming in real time or is this something you’re only understanding now in retrospect?

AJ

I think I knew immediately that this was the community I wanted to belong to. Honestly, it felt a little bit like what people describe about finding queer community. In high school I was hanging out with the stoners and maybe the jocks and sort of the popular kids, and I loved them, but deep down I knew that wasn’t actually my home. I felt different in ways I couldn’t articulate yet. At UCB I thought, “These are my people.”

Before you went on stage they taught everyone to touch each other’s backs and say, “I’ve got your back.” You’re about to walk on stage with no preparation and no plan, and what you’re saying is that no matter what happens out there, I’m going to support your idea. Good improv is fundamentally collaborative in that way. In improv, asking a question often means you’re negating the reality someone else is creating. The whole exercise is instead saying yes and moving with the idea forward.

I think that’s actually a really beautiful way to move through the world too. Instead of saying that’s a bad pitch or that’s a stupid idea, you say, “Okay, let’s follow it for a second.” Maybe something interesting happens if we stay with it a little longer.

EO

Did the community feel like a secret?

AJ

The funny thing is Donald Glover wasn’t the Donald Glover yet. I knew him because of Derrick Comedy and because he had gotten this writing job on 30 Rock. He wasn’t Childish Gambino. He wasn’t this giant cultural figure yet. But every time someone got hired onto a show or landed a writing job or booked something major, the feeling inside the theater was always the same: “Oh, it’s possible.”

You’d watched that person perform on a Thursday night in a tiny basement theater in front of almost nobody. You’d seen them be brilliant before the rest of the world had. So when everyone else finally caught up, it didn’t feel impossible. It felt like evidence. That was what made UCB so important. People kept leaving that little basement theater and becoming the next version of themselves. Someone would get staffed on a show, hired as a writer, or book a movie, and you’d think, “No, I knew they were incredible. I saw it before everybody else did. I got to watch them in their purest form.”

EO

Earlier you mentioned that you studied it. What were you actually studying?

AJ

I remember hearing somebody talk about the idea of developing your taste before your voice. Maybe it was Ira Glass. The idea was that taste is part of voice and before you can really know what your voice sounds like, you have to know what moves you and why.

Being at UCB was like being in a laboratory for that. Once I started working at the theater, I could go to shows for free, so it became my entire social life. I was there constantly. I was out every night seeing shows and seeing friends perform and watching people experiment. Honestly, a lot of it sucked. But that's part of the process too. You start editing in real time. You start realizing who your favorite performers are and why. You start noticing that someone is the loudest person on stage and someone else barely speaks but every single time they do, the room erupts. You start understanding rhythm and restraint and surprise and confidence. There were all these different ways of performing comedy unfolding in front of me every night.

I was reading every improv book I could find. I was reading theory about the form. I was studying people.

EO

At the same time, you’re making the web series.

AJ

Right. Ilana and I were on an improv team together and we couldn’t get onto the bigger teams at the theater. That felt like the path. You get on stage, industry people come watch, agents show up, somebody notices you, and then your career starts. That just wasn’t happening for us. We couldn’t get agents. We couldn't get commercial representation. We couldn’t get access to the next thing.

This was before the internet was what it is now. There was YouTube and early Facebook and not much else. Eventually we just thought, fuck it. Whatever this thing is between us is funny and specific and weird and maybe we should just make it ourselves.

So we started writing little scenes that were basically exaggerated versions of us. Some got really surreal and strange and some were literally just about not being able to get an egg sandwich in New York after eleven in the morning. We’d write them, then collaborate with friends to shoot and edit them, paying them a hundred dollars if we could afford it. There wasn’t a grand strategy. It was just momentum.

EO

Why YouTube?

AJ

Because it was the only place where you could put something and theoretically everyone could see it. This is 2009. There really wasn’t another version of that.

EO

What did the day to day actually feel like?

AJ

Honestly, it was the best. By the time we were making the web series, Ilana and I were working together at this company called LifeBooker, which was basically Groupon before Groupon. It was all deals, deals, deals. That’s all in the show too.

Lucia Aniello was across the room working as a copywriter and Ilana and I were cold calling salons all day trying to convince them to sign up for promotions. Once we'd made our sales for the day, we'd basically spend the rest of our time messaging each other ideas back and forth. Suddenly there was purpose.

EO

When did it stop feeling like a web series and start feeling like a television show?

AJ

I think it was just the feeling that this was working. Not commercially. Not professionally. Just spiritually. We were making ourselves laugh and people whose taste we trusted were responding to it. It felt like we were staying close to who we actually were as comedians rather than becoming what we thought people wanted.

Eventually Ilana got a manager through stand-up and she mentioned that we wanted to turn Broad City into a television show. Before that, though, we asked Amy Poehler if she'd be in our final web episode.

EO

Why Amy?

AJ

Because we loved Amy. But it’s important to say that Amy owned the theater. She wasn't running the day-to-day operations of the theater. It wasn't like Amy had personally seen us and decided we weren't good enough to get on stage. There were a million layers between us and her.

The web series wasn't some revenge fantasy against UCB either. We were still there every night. We were still auditioning and performing and trying to get onto teams. The web series was just an example of another route. If you believed in yourself enough, maybe there was another way.

EO

What were your thirties like?

AJ

My thirties were fucking crazy. I was in the middle of Broad City and for the first time I had financial security. Ilana and I were splitting script fees, which is not a salary you can live on for a year, but once the show was actually greenlit it became this completely different financial reality than anything I'd experienced before. I remember thinking, okay, this is what security feels like.

It also completely changed my relationship to work. Around twenty-seven, when we first pitched the show, my mentality shifted from having a day job and going out at night to work becoming the priority. Part of it was practical, but mostly I genuinely loved the work. I loved storytelling and collaboration and ideas and getting to be a creative worker every day. The work itself gave me so much satisfaction.

EO

So when did that period begin and when did it stop?

AJ

Twenty-seven was probably when it started. We pitched the show around then and Broad City came out when I was thirty. From there it was basically nonstop. We did five seasons and there was only one time we took any sort of meaningful break, and that was because we wanted to shoot a winter season instead of shooting in the summer again.

Other than that, we would finish post-production on a Friday and start writing the next season on Monday. It was a whirlwind, but it was an incredible one because every year we were just excited that we got to make another season of television. We were like, holy shit, we're on TV.

At the exact same time, though, I felt really alone. I loved what I was doing, but personally I felt disconnected from people and disconnected from myself. There was this feeling of, what is my life actually? And right in the middle of all of that I found myself thinking, wait, women? What’s happening?

EO

How old were you?

AJ

Thirty-two.

EO

That’s my age.

AJ

There you go. It genuinely caught me by surprise. It wasn't something I'd been consciously negotiating with myself for years. It just happened. But it also felt expansive. I was dating men too, but I fell in love with someone and it was the first time I'd ever really been in love.

Before that I think I carried this feeling that something was wrong with me. I thought maybe I was just someone who couldn't connect deeply with people or maybe I was just naturally casual in relationships. Then suddenly I understood what everyone had been talking about. At the same time I was writing I Might Regret This, which you photographed me for, and I was developing other projects and beginning work on A League of Their Own while we were finishing Broad City. By the fifth season I was effectively making two shows at once.

EO

How did that period reshape what you wanted from your life?

AJ

I remember thinking, “oh my god, love. I get it now.” I realized I wanted part of my life to be about this too. I wanted to live in romantic love and not only the love I found in work environments and creative collaborations. For a while, I found a better balance between those things.

Then I got my heart broken and immediately threw myself back into work even harder than before. Honestly though, it was a really fruitful period. I worked on myself a lot. I dated a lot. I loved that process. I felt like a baby queer in some ways. I was dating women and men but I was doing it with a much clearer understanding of who I was. Then Broad City ended, which was another enormous shift.

EO

Get into that.

AJ

Ending Broad City was wild. Ilana and I are still incredibly close and we talk all the time, but she will always be one of the biggest and most significant relationships of my life. Most people connect me to her more than anyone else. Someone will come up to me and say, I just saw Ilana, and immediately I feel connected to that moment.

Ending the show meant ending so many things all at once. It was the most fun I’ve ever had making anything. I should be so lucky to have another creative experience that joyful. But I also recognize that it was my first love creatively. Nothing can ever really be that again.

EO

How did that era bring you back to your work? What does work mean to you now?

AJ

I still love working. I love creating worlds and characters. But I think I’m back in that Broad City moment again where I’m realizing I have to trust my own instincts. That means believing in myself enough to stop listening to the noise around me. That’s what Ilana and I did together in the beginning. Right now I know the things I’m writing are good. The problem is that the ways I’ve been trying to get those things made over the last few years simply are not working. I love writing scripts, but scripts aren’t novels. Nobody reads the scripts that don’t get made. It feels like building worlds and then burying them underground.

The thing I love most is making things and putting them into the world, and for the last four years I haven’t been able to put anything into the world.

EO

What’s your relationship to writing now? Are you a reader who writes? And after everything we’ve just been talking about, what’s your relationship to belief?

AJ

I identify as a writer first. And yes, I think I’m absolutely a reader who writes. Reading feels very similar to watching improv for me. I love to study other people’s voices and techniques as ways of unfolding stories. You absorb all of it, and eventually it comes back out through you as something that’s your own.

I can get really down on myself, even though I know how lucky I am to get to do this every day. But I genuinely love the things I’m writing right now, and they’re all really different from each other. What I’ve become interested in is a question I’ve never really had to ask before: what does my voice sound like on its own? Broad City was with Ilana. A League of Their Own was with Will Graham. I’ve always made things with someone else. So what do my films look like? What does my voice sound like when it’s just me?

There’s overlap, obviously. I’m in all of those projects too. But I think where I am right now is much darker. A lot of it is about therapy. My projects are all just different ways of working through my own shit. I’m obsessed with the versions of ourselves that we carry around with us: the younger selves, the defensive selves, and the performative selves we put on. I’m interested in how those versions of us determine the ways we react to the people around us and the ways we move through the world.

The thing I’m making now feels connected to what you brought up earlier about energy. It’s that same feeling of, fuck it. Nobody can take this away from me because I’m not asking for permission anymore. They’re not going to tell me no because I’m not going there to ask.

EO

Not what changed you, necessarily, but how has Los Angeles changed you?

AJ

I should say I don’t only live here. I still live in New York too. For the past five years it’s been pretty close to half and half, although lately I’ve been spending more time in Los Angeles in shorter stretches. What I’ve realized is that New York fuels me up and Los Angeles is where I lock in.

I get recharged by being on the subway and walking around New York. I love walking. I have this thing I call “Woolfing around” because I became obsessed with The Hours, first the novel by Michael Cunningham and then the film, and then with Virginia Woolf herself. There’s this image of her walking around, thinking through her work as she moves through the world. So I say to myself, “I’m going to go Woolf around.” That's genuinely how I get ideas. I walk and I people-watch and I talk to myself and I think. I don’t really love walking in Los Angeles. You can walk in little pockets, but it’s not a walking culture. There’s no shade. Suddenly you’re stranded on some giant road and you’re like, “this sucks.”

In New York you’re not in the industry all the time. You’re around everybody. I’ve lived there longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. I think it still feels like home in a very particular way. So lately I’ve been trying to fuel up in New York and then come back to Los Angeles and get down to business.