Summary
Ilana Glazer: The Planet Is Burning is the comedian’s debut stand-up which offers some highlight jokes but could have benefitted from consistent energy.
At the start of the Amazon Prime Special Ilana Glazer: The Planet Is Burning, Ilana stomps down the stairs and on to the stage vibing to Rihanna’s “Sex with Me”. The crowd are wild, Ilana is wild, the atmosphere is wild. Ilana Glazer is funny, her jokes are good, but the energy on her debut stand-up special is slightly off.
That’s not to say I did not enjoy Ilana Glazer: The Planet Is Burning. I enjoy the way the Broad City star tentatively walks around on the stage, readying her next joke. If anything, Ilana Glazer is offering a lecture to her star-struck audience. She talks about how the planet is literally burning and how the current Government does not care because “they are old”. Ilana then moves to the differences and commonalities of gay and straight women, and how homophobic men are more bothered about the thought of being gay than gay people. Like how Lil Wayne says “no homo” at the start of “Lollipop” — nobody asked.
Ilana Glazer’s “no f–ks” approach is refreshing; her description of her stoner life and her relationship with her husband broadens a smile on your face. But I have to say the best joke that Ilana Glazer: The Planet Is Burning offers is her thoughts on Nazis. She describes her younger life as a Jewish person and how her Hebrew school did a simulation on “how to escape the holocaust” into a New World. The audacity of her experiences are amusing but serve odd irony. But it is Ilana’s theory, that Nazi’s were ahead in the “modern gay look” that secures this stand-up as satisfactory.
Ilana Glazer provides her take on the knee-high boots, the haircuts, the Aryan look, and the Gestapo walk; she hypothesizes that Nazis had a time machine into the future and applied it to their marketing concept — “Nazis were obsessed with the Jews”. By the end of her gag on Nazis, you can imagine neo-Nazis foaming from the mouth when Ilana suggests that Nazis use Grindr more often than you think.
I kind of wish Ilana Glazer: The Planet Is Burning applied the same energy and flow throughout, but it’s safe to say, I will look forward to her second stand-up.
