January was supposed to be plastic surgery recovery time. Nikki Glaser had it all mapped out: After barely being in her St. Louis home long enough to unpack her suitcase for all of 2024, she was going to get some work done on her face in the new year and spend the rest of the month flopped over with an ice pack.
“My agents knew that I wanted January completely off to get a brow lift or whatever my doctor suggested, and they were like, ‘Are you still having a procedure?’” Glaser says. “And I go, ‘No, what’s going on?’ They’re like, ‘What about hosting the Golden Globes?’”
So the brow lift will have to wait — “my doctor doesn’t think it can, but it can” — as Glaser is set to host the 82nd Golden Globes on Jan. 5.
It marks the next major step in the comedian’s upright career, which has been buoyed in 2024 by her scene-stealing turn at Netflix’s “The Roast of Tom Brady,” segments on Thursday Night Football and an HBO special.
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First Pick
“Generally in my career I’ve been someone you call when other people fall through,” Glaser says. “It’s only in the past couple of years where I’ve been the first person they want.”
The 40-year-old St. Louis native is something of a celebrity roast pro, having participated in the Comedy Central roasts of actors like Alec Baldwin and Rob Lowe, a style that has become synonymous with the Golden Globes thanks to past hosts Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Ricky Gervais.
“The fact that it’s scary excites me. What excites me is accomplishing it,” she says. “Ninety-percent of my job is that monologue and what people will remember of me as a host. So the exciting part is how good that will feel to celebrate backstage after it goes well. And then the scary part is it’s live TV. What if I get heckled?
“I’m not really worried about a joke not landing, to be honest with you, because I’m going to run it so many times around town in different audiences and practice it that it’s not going to feel like a crap shoot, even though you can’t really recreate the circumstances for which you’ll be performing that night. But it’s the same as the roasts: I can’t recreate those roasts, but I’m able to practice for them efficiently beforehand in a way that when I get out there, I know that these jokes have worked somewhere and if they don’t work tonight, it’s out of my control and I can’t blame myself for it.”
She’s waiting to begin work with her writing team until after the nominations are unveiled Monday, but in the meantime she’s been watching this year’s slate of films and shows and familiarizing herself with the crop of Hollywood celebrities likely to attend the Globes.
“I don’t want to ruin anyone’s night and I don’t want to skewer anyone in a way that will make them uncomfortable enough to make a face. That is not my goal, but I also want to call out hypocrisy and I want to make fun of Hollywood taking itself too seriously and all the things that it deserves to be mocked for. But I also want to make everyone have a good night and not make anyone feel roasted,” she says. “This isn’t a roast, no one’s signed up to be roasted, but at the same time, it kind of is because of my predecessors, Ricky and Tina and Amy, having a roast style of their jokes.”
Gervais, for one, is hoping she doesn’t hold back.
“I think she’ll be absolutely great. I hope she really goes for it and has a fun time,” he writes.
Glaser was gearing up for the release of her latest special, “Someday You’ll Die,” which aired on HBO in May, when she participated in the live taping of “The Roast of Tom Brady” on Netflix.
“I fought to get on the roast. It wasn’t just a foregone conclusion that I would be on it. I really advocated for myself and luckily they trusted me. But I don’t think anyone knew what was going to happen that night,” Glaser says. “Not even me. I just knew I was going to work as hard as possible to have a great set, but I didn’t know that it was going to be what it was.”
The retired quarterback’s roast garnered 1.67 billion viewing minutes during its first week, earning the top spot on Nielsen’s overall most-streamed programs list. Glaser’s set was just a few minutes of the three-hour program, but she instantly became the night’s breakout star.
“It was in the beginning of the night so everyone was still unsure how the live event was going to go,” recalls comedian Hannah Berner, who was in the audience for the live taping, of Glaser’s set. “The crowd was excited and there was good energy in the air. I was nervous because there were thousands of people in the stadium who weren’t all comedy fans. [Nikki] immediately had a confidence and aura around her that got the crowd focused and in the palm of her hands.”
Belle of the Ball
Sarah Silverman, Glaser’s longtime comedic idol, agrees.
“Nikki seems to be completely unaware of her brilliance. But boy she was the belle of the ball at the Tom Brady roast — and pretty much every roast she’s been a part of,” Silverman says. “She’s got that special sauce.”
“I wouldn’t be doing the Globes if it wasn’t for the roast,” Glaser says. “The roast changed my life, but I hope that it was bound to happen at some point for me. You really just need one of those windfall moments of where everyone kind of perks up and is like, ‘Who’s that?’ And that was mine. And I would’ve been happy had it never happened. I never was waiting for it. I have intense imposter syndrome, and so I’m never like, ‘Wait until they see what I can do.’ I’m always like, ‘Oh, I’ll try my best, but I can’t believe I’m even being asked to do this.’”
Glaser first had the sense that she was funny when playing a comedic role in a high school play and the drama teacher told her she was “a great comedic actress.”
“I didn’t even know what that was. I didn’t know there were different kinds of acting — but you remember a compliment,” she says.
All she wanted was to be on TV, and being an actress seemed to be the way to get there — so that’s what she set her sights on. She’d always been obsessed with comedy, to the point of getting a math test moved so she could watch the finale of “Seinfeld,” and studied it as she watched. But she didn’t start to put it into practice until her freshman year at the University of Colorado. Glaser struggled with an eating disorder and “looked so crazy and so alarming because I was so anorexic that no one wanted to be friends with me,” she says. She coped by trying to make people laugh in order to make friends — “I just turned up the volume on my personality.”
Her freshman year was the first time someone suggested she do stand-up.
“When you hear that and you have nothing else to do and you truly want to die because I was dying of an eating disorder, I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just try this at least before I die.’ And then that’s when I actually tried to get rid of my eating disorder because [stand-up] was the only thing I was ever good at,” she says. “The next day I called my counseling services on campus and was like, ‘I need to beat this thing now.’”
After one year in Colorado she transferred home to the University of Kansas, and started doing stand-up in Kansas City. The spring of her senior year she made the semifinals for “The Last Comic Standing,” which was the vote of confidence she needed to move to L.A. In the midst of temp babysitting jobs and nonstop stand-up appearances she got on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” which felt like the big “I’ve made it moment.”
“And nothing changed,” she says. “I moved back to St. Louis a month or two months after for a year and a half and really just did stand-up at that point. I had enough credits that I could start working at clubs, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can do 20 minutes now, not five minutes.’”
When she first started doing stand-up, she struggled with finding material.
Finding Her Voice
“My life was so small when I started comedy because of my eating disorder, and so sad that I didn’t have a love life to talk about. I had maybe kissed two boys in my whole life. I just didn’t have anything to pull from,” Glaser says. “So I was writing jokes that were lies about sex and dating, and I would write jokes for Sarah Silverman. In my mind I would go, ‘What would she write?’ I didn’t know what to write about. But when you start out in stand-up everyone tells you it takes 10 years to find your voice. So I was kind of patient.”
Glaser has become known, as she puts it, as “a sex comedian,” for her jokes about dating, her sex life and her body. To the viewer it comes across as someone extremely sure of themselves — Glaser promises it’s the opposite, but that’s why it works.
“My stand-up now is just the way I talk. I don’t need to get into a character and I don’t need to meditate or be alone backstage. I am who I am on stage and I’m very confident in the person I walk out as because that person’s not confident. I’m confident in being an unconfident person,” Glaser says. “I honestly think it’s one of the greatest attributes about myself, and I don’t think there are many, but the fact that I can admit I have low self-esteem and I’m not scared to share that with people, I think is one of my biggest strengths.”
“There isn’t a person more capable of producing perfection than Nikki,” says the comedian Emil Wakim, who is a featured cast member on “Saturday Night Live” this season.
The two first met when Glaser came to do a set in Bloomington, Ind., where Wakim was in college; he was assigned to pick her up from the airport. “Saying, ‘She’s the funniest and hardest working person I know’ seems almost hack-y and redundant because she kinda just becomes the ‘thing.’ It’s not like she works at something to just do a good job and call it a day — she becomes the standard of what the thing warrants. You watch her running jokes for a roast or a special taping and you’re just like, “Ohhh, that’s what the highest form of this is supposed to look like.”
Come Jan. 5, she turns her attention to Hollywood, capping off the biggest year of her career and staring down the next.
“I’m scared, but I’m also reassured by the fact that nothing in this business really lasts forever. Whether you bomb or whether you succeed, you’re forgotten pretty quickly. And it’s both depressing and comforting to know that it doesn’t matter,” Glaser says. “If I completely bomb, I can still have a career. I really believe that, but if I do well, it’ll be great for a little bit and then it’ll be forgotten just as much as if I bomb. I’ll be the talk of the town or in one way or another for a couple days, but that’s the most. And then it’ll go back to normal.”
Photographs by Caroline Tompkins
Styled by Alex Badia
Hair by Ben Skervin at The Wall Group
Makeup by Quinn Murphy at Walter Schupfer
Nails by Mamie Onishi at See Management
Senior market editor: Emily Mercer
Senior market editor, accessories: Thomas Waller
