'Time Traveling Bong' Is Just What It Sounds Like

The crux of stoner comedies largely hinges on a quest, undertaken by generally two or more friends who have adventure thrust upon them while they're a little too high to fully cope. The Dude goes seeking compensation for his rug, other dudes go looking for their car, Harold and Kumar want to eat White Castle—of course, things always go awry. Whatever important shit you're setting out to do on 4/20 (or any day you get really, really stoned), you're probably going to fuck it up. Even Afroman was going to clean his room, until he got high. For Ilana Glazer, weed and quests have always gone together, from the pilot episode of Broad City, in which she and co-star Abbi Jacobsen get high and try to raise money for Lil Wayne tickets, to her new miniseries, Time Traveling Bong, the first episode of which airs today.

"Weed is magical," Glazer told the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere last Saturday. "It justifies sincerity and being present. When you watch Friends, they are not stoned. With weed, with stoned characters, you're with them more, and it doesn't have to be some 90s intonation."

In TTB,__Glazer and Paul Downs (also of _Broad City_) play Sharee and Jeff, a pair of apartment-sharing cousins in New Jersey—"useless white people," joked Glazer. Sharee works at Hertz and dates a married man named Donnie, a kind of walking George Zimmerman allusion. Jeff hasn't gotten laid since high school and has accidentally ejaculated on three of Sharee's laptops. They're the kind of social dregs with nothing to do but get high and ride their bikes to Wawa.

The solution to their boredom comes in the form of a bong, which falls into Jeff and Sharee's possession when two people in futuristic jumpsuits drop from the sky in a funnel of smoke and are immediately hit and killed by a dude driving a Hummer. The cousins discover that the bong is a handheld time machine with simple instructions: Smoke once to travel. Smoke again to return.

Sharee and Jeff don't get off to a great start. Their first travel takes them to the prehistoric era, where they are almost gobbled up by a T-Rex. Their next trip takes them to Salem, Massachusetts, 1691, where a mob promptly arrests Sharee on suspicion for being a "crinkum–crankum" (a witch, in other words) and shatters their bong.

With the "structural integrity" of their time traveling, weed-toking device now compromised, the cousins bounce around history. Over the next two episodes, Jeff and Sharee engage in cave-people orgies, travel to a pre-Civil War plantation where they rescue three slaves, and take drastic measures in attempt to help a young Michael Jackson in 1963 Indiana. From there, it's on to Greece, where they participate in yet another orgy. In the final episode, they end up in a dystopian future where the Earth is an overheated garbage dump, society is dominated by an evil mega corporation, and the first official language of the United States is now Chinese.

If this all sounds a little half-baked—or even fully baked—that's because the idea for the show came to Glazer, Downs, and Time Traveling Bong's co-creator and director Lucia Aniello while stoned. The origin of the series goes back to 2012, when Glazer was crashing with Downs and Aniello in LA while pitching Broad City to Comedy Central. (Downs and Aniello are both writers for Broad City.) While blazed, the trio discussed just how foul the world would have smelled before the advent of the modern sewer system, and how much more intense the experience of that stench would be while high. This conversation became the basis for the original Time Traveling Bong short, released by College Humor.

"We didn't want it to be about the butterfly effect. First of all, that's a movie already," Glazer told the Tribeca audience. "And, what are we doing, time-travel math? No."

"And we didn't want to make it Bill and Ted–like, where we meet historical figures all the time," added Downs.

In the end, they decided on a balance of general stoner ineptitude in the face of absurd circumstances and one terrible run-in with a person of actual historical significance.

"It's so stupid," Glazer insisted. "Time Traveling Bong is so fucking stupid."

While the miniseries isn't meant to stand as any sort of major piece of critical cultural analysis, Aniello did gesture toward some of the show's more wry approaches to historical controversy.

"A lot of people romanticize time travel," she said. "But if you are a woman who were to time travel or anybody essentially that is not a white man, you're probably not going to have the best time."

Indeed Jeff and Sharee experience, and become complicit in, some of the nastier cultural crises of American history during their months-long stopover in the 1960s. When the cousins first arrive with the former slaves grabbed off the antebellum Southern plantation, they refer to themselves as "white saviors," a quick dig at white-guilt-turned-white-heroism naïveté. Later, they kidnap a young Michael Jackson, who idolizes Jeff's thin nose and refers to Jeff and Sharee as his "white mommy and daddy," setting him down the eventual path toward disfiguring plastic surgery.

The characters' awakenings aren't limited to race. There's gender as well. "Today I made $3 in tips, and I was groped relentlessly all day," Sharee says to Jeff, of her job as a waitress of the era. "When do men stop groping women? When? Tell me!"

"The 90s?" Jeff offers. "Maybe post-9/11? I don't know."

Jeff and Sharee aren't as slack-jawed and bumbling as stoners in the vein of Bill and Ted; they're pushed to their breaking point, as anyone from 2016 would be, when they're stuck in the 1960s. Where Sharee had once been content to date a married man whose idea of romance consists of dates to the shooting range and Applebee's, in the 1960s her treatment at the hands of the men around her leads to a diet-pill addiction and low-grade depression. Glazer and Downs aren't playing caricatures of stoners as we're used to seeing them—they're playing terrible people who happen to get high a lot and then have terrible things happen to them.

Still, the creators of the show aren't aiming for social analysis.

"It was an easier laugh when I was being abused versus when slaves are being taken away," Glazer said at the panel. "We still have opinions about history, and I guess we all can agree that history is mostly shitty. We did go with what we thought was funniest first."

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