Broad City Season 1, Episode 2 Recap: Nature’s Pocket

Broad City

P*$$y Weed

Season 1 Episode 2

Editor’s Rating 5 stars *****

(A reminder: Comedy Central just made all ten episodes of Broad City available for free, so we’re celebrating by recapping the first season.)

For most of us who have them, the real rite of passage to adulthood is about what you’re willing to put in your vagina.

This episode is about marking time, and the very different ways Abbi and Ilana decide to qualify themselves as full-fledged adults. For Abbi, the kickoff is watching Ilana pull a bag of weed out of her front hole (“nature’s pocket”), and deciding on the spot that buying her own weed is paramount for becoming the kind of adult she wants to be.  I’m always slightly fearful when Ilana’s ideas make sense, but the va-hee-na pot pocket is a stroke of genius, though I’m sure most gynecologists would disagree.

Ilana’s big adult move is to do her taxes without her parents, a task for which she is wholly unprepared, as evidenced by her crumpled brown bag of receipts and her search for W3 through W8 while she “works pretty hard to suck Uncle Sam’s D.” Taxes are a pain in the dick for even the most competent — what, like you haven’t fought the urge to jam all of your forms and papers into a manila envelope and call it a day? — and, after angering an accountant and getting kicked out of his office, Ilana ultimately decides to have her parents do her taxes anyway. She insists they’re good at getting her a refund, but Abbi astutely recognizes that they’re probably just sending her money.

The funniest part of this episode is that both women have increasingly juvenile reactions to their attempts at being an adult. After Abbi, failing to score the dregs of oregano that passes for pot in Washington Square Park, buys some weed from a junior-high version of Patrick Bateman. She and Ilana smoke some and head directly to a candy store, where Ilana breaks her veneer on a jawbreaker. Lincoln, a dentist, offers to fix it, and by the time they get there Abbi is so high she’s pushed over the edge by someone in the waiting room asking her if she’s a mom simply because she keeps playing with the kids there. Her fantastic exit plan was to gently roll away without saying a word, and it’s probably my favorite scene of the series — so weird and hilarious, the perfect embodiment of what women who don’t have or want kids feel like doing every single time someone asks us about this. “Do you have kids?” is an innocuous question, but if your answer is no, it’s generally followed up by the ultimate boner shrinker, when the person asking insists on knowing why. Why don’t I have or want kids? Have you met children? The real question is, why do you have them?

Abbi was right to collect her stuff and roll away, but she had to leave Lincoln’s office soon after setting off the fire alarms by smoking even more pot in the bathroom while waiting for Ilana to finish. Her rage reaches maximum overdrive when she and Ilana go to an office-supply store, where the “garbage people living on garbage island” use packing peanuts to send pillows and refuse to put paper in the recycling bin; after she attacks a cardboard cutout, she realizes she probably smoked too much pot and that’s why she can’t be in charge of buying her own. Me, too, girl, me, too — I live in a state where pot is legal so I don’t have to hide it, but I’m also black in an American city that is 92 percent white and I don’t want to get murdered for having it, so I strike a nice balance by not buying it at all.

Lincoln is the unsung hero, the beating heart of this episode. He’s always just this close to borderline-corny-dad-joke territory, but then he pulls it back with a weird quip about prosthetic balls or asking Ilana to take their relationship to the next level while she’s high on nitrous. His weirdness is right below the surface, but his sincerity usually wins out, even when Ilana is trying so hard to touch Abbi while kissing him that they all end up on the floor, with Abbi fighting to crawl away, no one saying a word.

In the end, Abbi gives in to jamming the pot in her vajean when she and Ilana see a grip of police officers and a drug-sniffing dog hanging out in the subway station. As long as you’re willing to touch anything at all in New York City and palm your own junk before boiling your hands, your passage to adulthood still hangs safely on the horizon.

Favorite Lines

• “I will not buy a SodaStream at full price! I will not do it!”
• “The biggest luxury is pooping when no one’s home.”
• “What kind of dog would you be?”
  “Slim Pug.”
  “You had that answer ready!”
  “Yeah I thought about it before.”