Ilana Glazer’s “Babes” Joins a Lineage of Pregnancy Comedies

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Some Hollywood clichés are so well understood that they become shorthand for improbable events in the real world. Among pregnant women, the expression “Hollywood birth” is often thrown around to refer to instances of childbirth that follow the tidy trajectory seen in movies and TV shows: A woman feels a dramatic gush of fluid between her legs, screams vigorously en route to a hospital, yells profanities at her husband, and, with a few Lamaze-style breaths, pushes out a healthy baby. (Sometimes there is a threat of delivery in the car.) Although childbirth is always momentous, the reality of it—an unwieldy and unpredictable process that often unfolds in the course of many days, and with varying degrees of medical intervention—does not fit neatly into most screenplays. As with childbirth, the humdrum or unpleasant realities of pregnancy are often smoothed over in popular culture. “She runs to the bathroom, she throws up once, and then, in the next scene, she’s in overalls painting a barn, like, ‘Yay! I can’t wait to meet you!’ ” Amy Schumer joked in her Netflix special “ Growing ,” from 2019. That special was filmed when Schumer was pregnant and suffering from an extreme and poorly understood version of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. Though the pregnancy debilitated Schumer physically, it ignited her creatively. As she toured the material for “Growing,” she was also filming a three-part documentary series for HBO, titled “Expecting Amy.” The experience of gestation and hyperemesis had such an impact on Schumer that she continued to explore it in her work, even after giving birth to her son. The second season of her Hulu series, “Life & Beth,” which was released earlier this year, is a loosely autobiographical chronicle of Schumer’s pregnancy and her marriage to the chef Chris Fischer. In the season finale, Beth (played by Schumer) and her husband (played by Michael Cera) head to a hospital with the calm, distinctly un-Hollywood air of the overly prepared: Beth is having a scheduled Cesarean section. Schumer is just one of the many female comics who have reëxamined pregnancy on the stage […]

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