Ilana Glazer is bringing her one-hour stand-up set to San Diego's Balboa Theatre on Tuesday, mixing jokes about gentle parenting and her five-year-old daughter with a focus on voter registration and local climate action. The comedian, actor, producer and activist behind Broad City has been touring the country and the world since May, and San Diego is just the latest stop on a run that has already taken her across Europe.
The show, called Ilana Glazer Live!, finds Glazer leaning hard into material about her daughter, who she says is five years old and, as she puts it, stone-cold sober. Speaking to KPBS, Glazer said becoming a mom made her more confident both generally and in her comedy, and that her 24-year-old self, the one who sold the Broad City pilot, wanted to be doing exactly the kind of work she's doing now.
From Web Series to Broadway Stages
Glazer's career arc is practically its own punchline about ambition. Broad City began as a scrappy independent web series running from 2009 to 2011 before Comedy Central picked it up for five seasons between 2014 and 2019, according to background compiled on Wikipedia. She went on to co-write the films Babes and False Positive, won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2022 as a producer on A Strange Loop, and in spring 2025 made her Broadway acting debut opposite George Clooney in the stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck.
Her stand-up has kept pace with that evolution. Hulu released her second special, Human Magic, in December 2024 as part of its Hularious lineup, following up on her 2020 Amazon Prime debut, The Planet Is Burning, per the Hulu guide to her work. The live hour she's bringing to the Balboa Theatre puts motherhood front and center.
Parenting Jokes Rooted in Gentle Parenting
In the current set, Glazer leans on physical comedy she treats almost like choreography, working her way through material about millennials having had more therapy than prior generations and now practicing gentle parenting as a result. She talks about how her daughter can name her feelings as they arise, a detail that doubles as both parenting pride and comic fodder, per her conversation with KPBS Midday.
But the set doesn't stay purely domestic. Glazer told the station she's a political person who sees comedy as her number one line of defense for facing reality and taking action, and she said people from the West Coast of the United States to Europe are mostly on the same page politically. She's addressed world events onstage as well, and she pointed to having Ms. Rachel on her podcast, where the children's media figure has spoken out against what Glazer described as the horrors happening in Gaza. Glazer said she supports public figures speaking up for their audiences and neighbors, telling the outlet that artists and audiences should connect to build a shared reality.
Voter Tables and Climate Groups Join the Tour
Glazer's activism dates back further than this tour. She co-founded the political non-profit Generator Collective in 2016 with Glennis Meagher to lower barriers to civic engagement and humanize political discussions through social media storytelling, according to her Wikipedia entry. That groundwork shows up directly at her shows now, where she highlights HeadCount, the non-partisan voter registration organization that has signed up more than 1.7 million voters nationwide through drives at concerts and other events since its 2004 founding, per Wikipedia's entry on the group.
She's also starting to pair local climate organizations with individual tour stops, a step up from registration tables alone. National non-profit Planet Reimagined, founded in 2018 by AJR bassist Adam Met and Mila Rosenthal, helps audiences follow through on climate actions after the applause dies down, according to reporting from Inside Climate News. For the San Diego stop, that local partner is the Climate Action Campaign, which offers San Diegans custom-tailored ways to help protect the climate. Nicole Capretz helped pass San Diego's plan for a 100% clean-energy goal by 2035.
A Vaudeville Stage Built for the Mix
The venue itself carries its own century of history. The Balboa Theatre opened in 1924 as a vaudeville house and movie palace, earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, and reopened in 2008 after a $26.5 million restoration. It's the kind of old-guard San Diego stage now hosting a comedian who treats her set list and her voter tables as part of the same night out.
Tuesday's show folds it all together: stoner-mom jokes, a five-year-old who names her feelings, and Glazer's civic and climate activism. Glazer has said comedy, pleasure and joy matter alongside activism, and invited San Diego audiences to the show.
