Abbi Jacobson
Photograph of comedian Abbi Jacobson by Lane Savage.
Courtesy of Comedy Central.
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for young female comedians, Abbi Jacobson teamed up with fellow comedian Ilana Glazer to create the immensely popular Broad City. Jacobson studied fine art and video production at the Maryland Institute College of Art and stand-up-comedy under poet Jeremy Sigler. After graduating in 2006, she moved to New York and began taking classes with the Atlantic Theater Company and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where she befriended Ilana Glazer. Finding it impossible to break into established comedy groups, Jacobson and Glazer created Broad City as a YouTube web series that ran from 2009 to 2011 and adapted it as a live show for Upright Citizens Brigade. In 2014 the pair debuted Broad City as a full-length sitcom on Comedy Central, loosely based on their own mishaps as struggling twenty-somethings trying to make it in New York. Jacobson launched a one-woman show, Welcome to Camp, in 2011.
Since Broad City concluded with its fifth season in 2016, Jacobson delved into voice acting with a small part in the critically acclaimed animated series BoJack Horseman and made a cameo appearance on sketch comedy show Portlandia in 2017. She starred as Bean in Disenchantment (2018-ongoing), another animated series. In 2018, Jacobson released her first book, titled I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff. In 2022 Jacobson co-created, produced, and starred as Carson Shaw in A League of Their Own, a spin-off series from the 1992 movie with the same name. Set in the 1940s, the series focused on the players of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Wanting to bring light to the untold stories of the queer women who proceeded her, Jacobson’s A League of Their Own featured queer relationships and female characters with varied sexualities and gender expressions and touched on issues of race in telling the story of Max, a black woman who was barred from joining the unintegrated AAGPBL, alongside Jacobson’s character. In 2023 the series was renewed for its second and final season.
