Nikki Glaser’s Wild, Viral Week: I Don’t Know If I’ll Have ‘Moment in My Career Like That Again’
The best week of comedian Nikki Glaser’s career — with her headline-dominating set at the roast of Tom Brady followed by the release of her new stand-up special — was not without unexpected surprises.
“Plopping down on the couch after that set was maybe the greatest feeling I’ll ever have in my life,” Glaser said to IndieWire about Netflix’s live Brady joke fest. “The amount of relief of nailing that when it’s live, when you’re on your period and you thought it ended, but it just started up again right before you walked onstage. And there were no tampons in the Kia Forum, so you had to use a folded-up napkin, and make yourself a pad, which is only being hung in place by a tiny strip of spandex on your thong that could fall out at any second. There was so many things that could have gone wrong live on TV in that moment!”
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Luckily, a woman who has been performing in clubs around the world for 20 years wasn’t going to let any ill-timed body surprises get in her way. And after her barnburner of a set — “Do you guys know about [Tom’s] diet program? It is so strict. But if you follow it exactly as he does, you too can lose your family,” she cracked — host Kevin Hart pointed out to her and the audience that she’d earned a standing ovation.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever have a moment in my career like that again, and I’m totally OK if I don’t, because I felt it once and that was enough,” she said.
The internet was abuzz for more, however. As luck would have it (“I didn’t Taylor Swift Mastermind it,” the longtime Swiftie joked) her new stand-up special, “Someday You’ll Die,” was about to hit HBO, where it has subsequently nabbed an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) as well as hit over 3 million viewers since its May premiere.
The hour unpacks her bafflement about a topic familiar to any thirty-something friend group: the decision to have kids or not. Glaser doesn’t want them, most of her good friends do, and she set out to figure out why that is. The choice, always fraught, became even more of a lightning rod this summer after the special aired, with online discourse dominated by Childless Cat Ladies and JD Vance. Another moment of good timing for Glaser as women all over the country opened up more about the ultra-personal decision.
“I never set out to go, ‘What’s funny? What are people gonna like?’ It was really about, ‘What am I disturbed by?,'” she said of putting the special together. “I can’t imagine wanting [a baby]. I don’t relate at all. It just felt like a really huge divide that happened between all of my friends who I otherwise feel very similarly to. [The group chat] became only talking about fertility and having a baby. And it was this shift that I did not expect to ever happen.”
“Someday You’ll Die” finds her musing about feeling there must be something wrong with her because of her lack of baby desire. “Even when I was a kid I would get baby dolls for Christmas and be like, ‘Oh God, this seems like a lot of work.’ …I tr[ied] to abandon it in front of my brother’s toy firehouse,” she jokes in the special.
It would be easy to chalk this up to Cool Girl posturing, but Glaser is earnest about the tension at the heart of her personal comedy. “I hate that I am not like other girls, and I’m desperate to just be a normal girl, and I’m just not, and this is a quest to figure out what’s going on with me,” she said. “I didn’t really find the answers, but I found a way to make fun of the things that I am.”
It is a revealing project for the comedian, who is a regular on the roast and touring circuit as well as a celebrity host for reality programs such as “FBoy Island.” It also comes at a time when truth in comedy is under the microscope. Comedy fans want to laugh, yes, but many also demand rigorous honesty. And lots also need comedians to parrot back their own respective individual beliefs. Glaser’s been in the game a long time — how does she think about truth in stand-up? Does nothing else matter if the punchlines hit?
“I’m not a politician; I’m not enacting laws. My job is to be truthful to myself,” she said. “And what’s authentic for me is to share these dark thoughts I have; it really releases some of the shame. I struggle with the morality that’s put on comedians to say the right thing and have the right take. We do have an influence, obviously, but we’re also telling jokes! …[It’s hard], because the things I do think are so wrong and so bad, and there is that fear of getting canceled for saying the wrong thing. But ultimately, I know I’m a good person. I’ve dealt with a lot of like, ‘Am I bad person because of these thoughts?’ And I’m really not. I can sleep well at night knowing that I really didn’t say them to hurt anyone. … I’m only as sick as my secrets, so I just try to release as many secrets as possible up there.”
Said secrets include suicidal thoughts and depression struggles. In “Someday You’ll Die,” she ponders that it might just be easier to end it all. “Guns are easier to find than compassion,” she cracks. (Glaser calls out the suicide lifeline, 988, throughout the special.) It’s edgy material that took her a while to get to a point where audiences felt comfortable laughing with her.
“It becomes a challenge,” Glaser said of the intoxicating thrill to get crowds to give a chuckle of recognition about something taboo, whether that be hoping a friend miscarries so they can still hang out, or pondering the easiest way to kill herself. “The suicide material was stuff I was getting a lot of pushback from audiences, and I thought, ‘Oh, I guess I can’t really go there and talk about my suicidal thoughts and joking about how I’ll probably kill myself someday.’ They’re never gonna be okay with it. But I just kept going and kept trying it until I found a way that actually worked. And it was one of the biggest laughs of my entire set. That was really gratifying.”
Watching her whip out punchlines on everything from her mom’s biggest concerns about her potential death to (classic Glaser) fake gang bangs she acts out with her boyfriend, it’s obvious she has no shortage of “dark thoughts” to explore. Which just means she’ll hopefully be onstage for a very long time.
Apologies to Tom Brady.
“Someday You’ll Die” is now streaming on Max.
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