A scene from ‘Broad City’ birthed TikTok’s phrase of the week: ‘In da clerb, we all fam’
10 years later ‘Broad City’ makes a new audience laugh.
Credit: TVLine / Contributor / Penske Media via Getty Images
Do the voices in the “in da clerb, we all fam” soundbite circulating on TikTok sound vaguely familiar? Do they perhaps bring you back to a time of bandage dresses and mustache prints before weed was legal in New York City? That’s because they are the voices of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on their hit show Broad City.
Broad City’s last episode may have aired in 2019, but if TikTok is any indication Jacobson and Glazer’s absurdist, stoner humor still resonates. In the clip that now soundtracks over 70,000 videos, Abbi asks, “Do you know them?” and Ilana responds, “No, but in da clerb, we all fam.” Abbi doesn’t understand and Ilana repeats it before saying, “In da club, we are all family, are you racist?”
Everyone from Charli XCX and Troye Sivan to Sabrina Carpenter has lip-synched to the video, often with a caption detailing a misunderstanding or situation where “we all fam.” For example, Charli XCX and Sivan’s video reads, “re: the twinks in the crowd at Sweat” about their joint tour. Carpenter’s said, “My 30-year-old fans trying to talk to my 12-year-old fans.”
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The sound wasn’t uploaded to TikTok with the visual of Abbi and Ilana making its origin hard to pin down for many. But the scene has been beloved among Broad City fans. A YouTube video of it posted 8 years ago has over 80,000 views. The comments section is riddled with years-old messages like, “This still makes me laugh out loud” and “I think about this scene a lot.”
Some fans are frustrated with the dialogue being seen as TikTok slang. One X user wrote, “They’re calling these Broad City lines ‘Tiktok speak’ in the quotes guys this is a nightmare. My culture is not a costume. Halloween is coming up, be conscious, listen and learn.”
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The trend became further decontextualized when it morphed into a meme on X. Users are captioning a wide variety of photos of groups of people with, “in da clerb, we all fam.” Films like Bottoms and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies have gotten the “in da clerb, we all fam” treatment as well as shows like Succession and The Sex Lives of College Girls. The phrase is also being used to caption symbols of fandom. One clever post references Chappell Roan’s reading, “in the pink pony clerb, we all fam.”
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So, for now, “in da clerb, we all fam” is the turn of phrase du jour — until a new soundbite is pulled out of obscurity and forced into our cultural consciousness.
Elena is a tech reporter and the resident Gen Z expert at Mashable. She covers TikTok and digital trends. She recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in American History. Email her at [email protected] or follow her @ecaviar_.
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