“We come together tonight with a common goal.”
To the comedian Nikki Glaser, this was a great premise in search of a better punchline.
Over Zoom, three days after nominations for the Golden Globes were announced last month, she invited ideas from her staff of 10 writers for the opening monologue that she will deliver as the host on Sunday. She and the writers were also together for a common goal, finding something funnier than: “To get out of here before Dax Shepard asked you to do his podcast.”
Glaser, 40, seated cross-legged in black pants on her couch in West Hollywood, liked the joke but thought it was too wordy. And maybe, she said, it could be harsher. One writer, Sean O’Connor, suggested: “Getting out without having a conversation with Jesse Eisenberg.”
She smiled and said they could think more out of the box.
“Leave before Harrison Ford snaps at you.”
“Getting Ted Sarandos’s personal number.”
“See if they can parlay a Golden Globes win into an appearance on ‘Hot Ones.’”
Glaser considered each punchline politely, patiently responding to every one. She described this as the honeymoon period: Every joke seemed fun and new. She told the group they were on pace to make a great set. When she turned an idea down, she tended to do it with praise. (“Really good idea but …”) The writers’ room slogan could have been: Making mean jokes nicely.
Riding high after her acclaimed performance at the Tom Brady roast was streamed live on Netflix in May, Glaser is transitioning from star comic to head of a comedy operation. “Nikki World,” one writer called it.
As she explained, “I used to feel like I need a hand in every joke I tell, but I now know that part of my talent is curating and knowing what works with my delivery.”
I spent close to a month in Nikki World, observing how her team develops and hones an awards show monologue. Later, she spelled out to me how she expected the month before the ceremony to go: She would do the set in clubs every night multiple times, shed a few tears, get bored with her jokes, get worse at delivering them, and then a few days before the Globes, have a panic attack. “I know myself,” she said. That prediction wasn’t entirely borne out (no tears), but she was close.
What remained consistent throughout was Glaser’s stubborn commitment to high standards in getting laughs. “We have five really good jokes,” she told her staff before a slight deepening of her voice and the familiar pivot of a veteran comic: “Aim to beat them all.”
Glaser’s lodestars are Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who together hosted the Golden Globes four times. When in a rut, she binges Fey’s sitcom “30 Rock.”
“Last night Chris and I got in a big fight and then watched Tina and Amy’s monologues again,” she told her staff, referring to her producer and boyfriend, Chris Convy, who has been at her side throughout the process. Their fight was over whether more people would get a reference to “Call Her Daddy” or to Eisenberg.
Glaser advised her writers to study those monologues and took a moment to marvel at Fey’s starting her 2015 Globes gig by saying: “Welcome, you bunch of despicable, spoiled, minimally talented brats.”
“That’s the tone I like where there’s an everyman aspect,” she told her writers. Smiling, she reflected more: “I couldn’t go that hard.”
That might surprise some. This is the comedian whose Tom Brady roast set was so pointed that it made a quarterback who had taken punishing hits for decades say these shots hurt enough that he wouldn’t do it again. But Glaser, a self-aware veteran of clubs, podcasts and late-night talk shows, is highly alert not just to the room but also to her place in it. She would not make the mistake Jo Koy did hosting last year’s Globes when he didn’t take his writers’ advice to start with a self-deprecating introduction, then blamed them for bombing. He acted as if he was performing for his fans as opposed to the celebrity crowd and the broader television audience.
Glaser said Fey got away with that “minimally talented” insult because it was her third hosting assignment and she had been a television star for 15 years, a showrunner for most of them. She was talking to peers. Glaser isn’t there — yet.
The obstacle course of awards show monologues involves navigating two very different audiences: the people watching at home and the stars in the room. Some comics focus on one or the other, but Glaser said it was critical to “split the difference.”
She told a joke about Diddy that killed at a club but warned the crowd it might not work at the Globes. Someone yelled: “Do it!”
“You promise you will still be hollering on your couch when it dies in the room? I don’t think you will,” she responded, explaining her thoughts by phone the next day. “I don’t know if I’m savvy enough to watch a joke that bombs on TV and still go: That’s still a good joke. It’s almost more important that it gets a laugh in the room than the substance of the joke itself. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.”
Glaser faces a showbiz paradox: She must ingratiate herself with the stars in front of her, but the reason she was chosen for the job was that she had brutalized the stars in front of her. “No one is going to do a better roast set than that,” Conan O’Brien said on his podcast after the Tom Brady event.
“I implemented a system for the roast,” Glaser explained, and that process, Convy said, is her blueprint. She meets daily with an inner circle of writers (O’Connor, Convy, Mike Gibbons and Brian Frange) to go over the set and three or four times a week with a larger group of writers. Add a writer’s assistant and publicists, and you have an organization with the scale of a late-night show. “Anyone not doing that is leaving success on the floor,” she said. “I am happy to pay my entire paycheck to do that.”
Her goal now is bigger than killing. It’s to set the stage for future projects together, including awards shows. “I want the holiday season to remind me of Golden Globe prep,” she said. “I want the scent of holly and pine to remind me of writing.”
FIVE DAYS LATER, Convy was sitting in the back of the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, watching Glaser test new jokes about “Wicked.” Coming from doing press with hair styled and makeup on, she looked much more put together than your typical joke slinger. She held her phone in one hand as she went through the set at a quick pace. “‘Wicked’ proved that we love musicals about the origin story of a villain who wears a lot of makeup,” she said, adding: “‘Joker 2’ proved that we also hate those same types of musicals.”
A smattering of laughs. Convy typed on his phone: “Joker 2: Lukewarm.”
Afterward, Glaser sat down with Convy and two writers, and her tone immediately shifted from performative charm to brass-tacks post-gaming. “The Zendaya joke needs more,” she said, looking at her phone to remind her of jokes, sighing that the opening still wasn’t there. An Ozempic joke was better than the response it received, Glaser insisted, blaming the way she stumbled over a previous line.
Glaser suggests a new way to go at “Wicked” and the “Joker” sequel before concluding, “It’s not funny. It’s just clever.”
Her emphasis is on pruning every bit of excess. Frange, the writer, had told the staff to overwrite premises because you shouldn’t assume audiences know the details of, say, the “Wicked” press tour. And O’Connor said the writers had told Glaser that she was famous enough that people would want to hear her speak at length on subjects, like Chris Rock does. But Glaser’s instinct is the opposite: To go quick and spare, allow jokes to go over heads as long as there’s a promise of another one coming soon after.
While rewatching Fey and Poehler made her consider more shout-outs to stars at the ceremony, she worried that applause breaks would slow her up. “It wastes time,” she concluded. Transitions are a pet peeve. “I don’t tolerate any information that doesn’t have a punchline attached,” she explained.
This emphasis applies to tangling with the crowd. “I don’t want to pause and say, ‘Can you believe I went there?’” she said with vocal fry to her writers. Then she stated bluntly: “This should be a confident machine.”
Ever alert to the big picture, Convy kept the postgame moving, asking about what was missing. “Where are we on ‘Anora’?” he asked the table, referring to one of the nominated movies.
Looking down at her phone, Glaser said: “We’re ‘Anora’-ing it.” Convy turned to me and said, “I want that joke off the record.”
ONE WEEK BEFORE THE CEREMONY, Glaser sounded confident, tired and a little frustrated. She performed the monologue every night in December except Christmas and one other day due to sickness. “I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said wearily.
The honeymoon was over. Asked if the current set beats the jokes at the writers’ room meeting in early December, she said they were 70 percent better.
The bit about “the common goal” was gone, then put back in with a wry punchline about the goal being to get Kamala Harris elected president. But that stepped on another line, so it was cut again. “The jokes are strong,” she said, “but I’m feeling fatigue trying to revive some areas that aren’t clicking.”
Foremost among the bothersome spots were the “Wicked” jokes. The “Wicked” and “Joker 2” lines had somehow made their way back in, but in an entirely new form. There were two punchline options: one succinct, the other verbose. There was a joke about Jeff Goldblum, a star of “Wicked,” not being a good singer that she liked but that just couldn’t get a laugh. Glaser found this so maddening that she had stopped a show at the Ice House in Pasadena, Calif., and asked the crowd if they knew him (applause) and if they agreed he was a bad singer (more applause). She conceded defeat.
Before we spoke, she had been on a 30-minute call dedicated to pitching “Wicked” bits. She had a new opening joke she was happy with, a quick one about Ozempic. But as the broadcast grew closer and parts were trimmed, issues other than whether a line was funny cropped up. Did she have too many jokes about being horny? (Maybe.) Was the point of view on some of the riskier jokes clear enough? She had just rewatched a Steve Martin Oscar monologue and was impressed with how he had shoehorned so many names in. Did she need to put more stars in?
“Once we strip away my little jokes, like, am I doing a good job of setting the stage for what an important night this is?” she asked. “And are we really honoring these people and celebrating what this night is all about?”
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, after performing at four clubs the night before, Glaser sounded different than I had heard before. She had been cutting chunks of the set and now there were “flow issues.” The set wasn’t “singing,” she told me by phone. The same day, the writer Sean O’Connor, who accompanies her to her sets, told me that New Year’s Eve crowds get drunker and worse as it gets closer to midnight.
Glaser was speaking faster and with more doubt than she had allowed previously, alternating between anxiety and defensive bluster. She was still questioning the point of view of a few jokes. She was still going back and forth about the sexual jokes, counting the number of references to her being horny, feeling there were too many, but now thinking she’s good at them, so it’s the right number. And the “Wicked” jokes were still fluid. Glaser was adding to things to obsess over. “Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles?” she wondered.
This wasn’t exactly the panic attack she had predicted. But Glaser said she had performed the jokes at clubs so often (91 times before the ceremony) that she could no longer tell if they were funny. How could she? She knew every surprise coming. She likened her relationship with her material to a marriage where she’s not gaga anymore. The jokes have been reliable, sure, but a political one that always kills recently bombed. That rattled her. “Maybe it bums people out,” she said, sounding confused.
Then she said maybe it was just that the gig seemed like such a big deal, then almost as if trying to fix that, she contradicted herself, saying it wasn’t.
She had watched awards show monologues that had been forgotten, she said, then added that she had standup dates lined up for next year, almost as if she had worked past the catastrophizing phase into the moving-on one. Glaser then said something that took me by surprise: “There’s no way I’m going to bomb. There’s just no way.”
Her set had killed so many times. She had put in the hours of work. And from the first writers’ meeting to the comedy clubs to every interview, Glaser had projected complete confidence. But now she was allowing doubt to creep in. She imagined what would happen if she bombed. What if hard work didn’t pay off? Glaser said she believes in manifesting so was uncomfortable with this line of thought. She doesn’t like to consider failure. Days away from her debut at a major awards show, she sounded more vulnerable human than confident machine. At some point, talking to her stopped feeling like an interview and more like eavesdropping as Glaser let her inner voice spiral.
“The worst thing that could happen is if I faint or have some kind of stroke,” she said. “Those are my biggest worries, but the material is there. 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, I just feel confident.”
Confidence is a funny thing. It can change not only night to night, but moment to moment. When Glaser got in trouble with hers, she returned to Fey and Poehler. When she watched their monologues, she noticed the commitment, even to the silliest, most tossed-off-seeming idea. She said she thought her jokes were as good as the ones in their monologues. “What’s lacking right now that they had was the comfort, the confidence in the performance,” she said.
What reassures her, she said, is the same crisis that occurred before the roast. She grew tired of her own jokes. Just doing it for real, the performance, saved her. “You have to fake it at first a little bit,” she said of her enthusiasm for familiar punchlines.
Glaser compared the feeling of the performance, the final time you tell familiar jokes, to the last time you talk to a boyfriend after a breakup. “Even though you may be tired of them, you get something back in that last goodbye because you are so in the moment,” she said, adding with a hopeful lilt in her voice. “It’ll feel new again.”