Comedian Ilana Glazer is bringing a mix of sharp cultural observations and deeply personal stories to Northampton next week, tackling everything from parenting and marriage to billionaires and being a “middle-aged millennial” at the age of 39 in her stand-up show at the Academy of Music on Aug. 12.
“In my personal life and in my professional creative life, I’m trying to hold the big and small, the hard and soft, the light and the dark, gently,” she said. “I’m talking about the world outside of the theater, but also vibing on the daily minutia and joys that we’re all experiencing.”
Therapy is another recurring topic in the set of the Emmy and Tony Award-winning star of the Comedy Central sitcom “Broad City.”
“I’m talking about therapy,” Glazer said. “I do so much therapy. I do therapy three times a week, which means my mental health is off-the-charts good.”
This isn’t Glazer’s first time in Northampton; she last performed at the Academy of Music in 2023.
“It was really fun. The crowd’s so funny, we’re cracking up and the vibe is, I feel like I kind of fit in there,” she said. “The energy is groovy, but there’s a challenging nature to it. Strong women — I love it.”
In fact, Glazer also owes her existence to the Valley: her parents met at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the late 1970s and lived in Hadley for a time before moving back to Long Island, where Glazer grew up. As a child, Glazer got to know western Massachusetts through what she remembers as “drivable, cost-effective family vacations.”
Interestingly, Glazer also isn’t the only person on the “Broad City” creative team who has a connection to western Massachusetts: Lucia Aniello, an executive producer, director and writer on the show, grew up in Hadley.
“[Aniello is] one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in my life. … I think that her growing up in Hadley has something to do with it,” Glazer said, attributing the town’s positive influence to both “the gorgeous landscape and the crunchy, progressive community.”
“Lucia and I have really connected about the beauty of the area,” she added. “Even though I was a newcomer and had this narrative about it and she had grown up there, we both actually valued its beauty for its landscape and people equally.”
Glazer reflected on how celebrity culture in New York differs from Europe, where she recently spent a month performing.
“There’s a low-key nature about celebrity in New York, but not as low-key as in Europe,” she said. “People in Europe, having their basic needs met, they just care less about celebrity. It’s so crazy and palpable … They also respect family more, where they’re like, ‘You’re with your kid, I’ll leave you alone.’”
When Glazer was part of “Broad City,” playing the devil-may-care stoner Ilana Wexler, strangers would “think I wanted to party or something, whereas nowadays, as a middle-aged millennial, people, even if they do know me, have a softer, much more respectful sense about my space, which has been a really lovely feature of getting older,” she said.
Glazer started touring about a decade ago, and one of her biggest takeaways since then is, “Women and femmes do not have half as much representation as we need to feel seen, heard and counted.”
“We’re laughing together, but we’re also celebrating our existence together in these shows, and there’s a tragicness to it that you just don’t get to hear women or femme-identifying people talk about their experience honestly with the ugliness and the beauty in full regularly,” she said. “It’s an irregular experience. It’s an abnormal occurrence. And it’s tragic, but I’ll tell you, it definitely heightens the absurdity for the context of stand-up comedy.”
On this tour, which kicked off in May, Glazer has also noticed more men at her shows, which is “so sweet and delightful,” she said.
“Just compared to the last tour, it is not men being dragged along by their female partners and finding, to their surprise, ‘Oh, this is really funny to me, too.’ … Now, in my audience, I’m finding men seeking out my shows,” she said.
At her show in Houston in June, she noticed two middle-aged guys sitting front and center. “They appeared to be cisgender straight guys but desperate for this kind of comedy — to see a woman be [expletive] funny, and their energy was also supportive. They’re nodding along like, ‘Yes, girl!’” she said.
“I’m sensing this softness from my audience in general in these two forms — in women and femmes … breathing a sigh of relief, and men [not wanting] toxic masculinity running their world, either,” she added. “It’s been really joyous and been giving me hope that millennials can be the generation that decides to address all the structures that have divided the United States for so long.”
Tickets are $60.90, including fees, at aomtheatre.com, by phone at 413-584-9032 or at the Academy of Music box office. The show is recommended for audiences age 15 and up.
