Who Is Nikki Glaser? The Comedy Roast Queen Takes on the Golden Globes

Nikki Glaser is well aware that not everyone who tunes into the Golden Globes on Sunday night will know who she is. And it’s that self-awareness she’s hoping will help her avoid the disaster at last year’s ceremony, when comedian Jo Koy bombed harder than any award show host in history.

“It taught me the importance of contextualizing yourself to the room as a comedian,” Glaser told Variety of her ‘reputation’ in an interview ahead of the show. “Comedians, we would love to be thought of in the same light as these A-listers, but we just aren’t.”

Koy’s monologue “would have gone a lot better” if he had acknowledged the fact that he was so unknown to many of the huge celebrities in the room, and the broad audience watching at home, she argued.

Glaser has decided to take a very different approach: “I’m going the other way and not assuming anyone knows who I am, and making sure they’re introduced to me before I start making jokes about them.”

So who is Nikki Glaser? And how did she land this gig, hosting the first big show of awards season?

The 40-year-old St. Louis native (and Taylor Swift superfan) has been a working stand-up since she was just 18, making her TV debut in 2009 on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. But it was the Comedy Central roast circuit that really launched her career, taking on Rob Lowe (and more memorably, Ann Coulter) in 2016, Bruce Willis in 2018 and Alec Baldwin in 2019.

So it was fitting that despite several impressive stand-up sets and a stint hosting the popular reality dating show F-Boy Island, it was the 2024 roast of Tom Brady—which topped all other Netflix specials with 2.9 billion minutes streamed last year—that cemented Glaser as a bonafide star in her field.

In a room that also included Roastmaster General Jeff Ross, Kevin Hart and numerous other stand-up giants, Glaser walked away the undisputed comedy champ of the night. Her ruthless jokes at Brady’s expense scored hard, like this one: “You have seven rings. Well, eight now that Gisele gave hers back… Tom, the only thing dumber than you saying yes to this roast was when you said, ‘Hey babe, you should try jiu-jitsu.’”

The performance is almost certainly what landed Glaser her gig hosting the Golden Globes—where, by the way, she is also nominated for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy alongside superstars like Adam Sandler, Ali Wong, and Jamie Foxx.

Now, she is positioning herself to be an amalgamation of past hosts Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, all of whom she says have offered her advice in advance of the big show.

As for how mean her jokes will be, Glaser admitted on an episode of The Last Laugh podcast last year in the run-up to the Brady roast that as she gets older, her bar for cruelty has gone up. “I will not pull punches,” she said at the time, before explaining that a line has to be “really good to be that mean.” One topic she apparently will not be touching, however, is the Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni scandal, saying in another interview that it’s “such a hot-button thing right now that even a mere mention of it will seem like I could be on the wrong side of things.”

The only thing she really cares about is getting laughs. That’s why she has been running her Globes jokes at clubs all over both New York and L.A. these past few weeks.

“There’s no way I’m going to bomb. There’s just no way,” she told The New York Times this past week. “There’s nothing in the set that I feel is so offensive that it would tarnish any kind of opportunities or relationships with people. Not to say that I’m not going there or doing stuff that won’t make some headlines, but it’s just, I just feel confident.”

For more, listen to Nikki Glaser talk about roasting Tom Brady, her Golden Globe-nominated stand-up special and more on The Last Laugh podcast.