For Nikki Glaser, Comedy Is Easy. Living Is Hard
Nikki Glaser is turned on. That the comedian is, at full volume, discussing her level of arousal in a restaurant — she is “damp downstairs,” to be precise — is probably not surprising to anyone who has seen her four standup specials. In her most recent, Someday You’ll Die, Glaser extensively describes her boyfriend of 10 years, Chris Convy (who also produces Glaser’s work), blindfolding and restraining her while pretending to be a parade of different men coming in to… actually, like Glaser, feel free to use your imagination here.
The HBO special came out in May, less than a week after The Roast of Tom Brady, a live Netflix production featuring everyone from NFL legends like Peyton Manning to Kevin Hart, Kim Kardashian, and a disheveled and pallid Ben Affleck. That night, Glaser had a career-changing set. After a series of (very funny!) jokes about how repulsive and pathetic her fellow roasters were and a public confession to Convy, “the love of my life,” that “I would shoot you in the fucking face for a lottery ticket to suck this guy’s dick,” she addressed the quarterback. “Tom also lost $30 million in crypto,” Glaser said. “Tom, how did you fall for that? Even Gronk” — that’s former Brady teammate Rob Gronkowski, who Glaser had just described as putting “the ‘tard’ in ‘retarded’” — “was like, ‘Me know that not real money.’” (“I did,” Gronk grunted onstage.) The crowd gave Glaser a standing ovation.
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Suddenly, Glaser was everywhere. She appeared on The Howard Stern Show and the massive podcast SmartLess. She began a 67-show theater tour of North America that will continue through June. And she was asked to host the 2025 Golden Globes, where she is also nominated for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television for Someday You’ll Die. The ceremony will air on CBS Jan. 5 and is the topic that led us to what Glaser describes as her “leak in the basement.” She’s positive A-list audience members like George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, and Brad Pitt won’t be familiar with her, so before she starts mocking the famous attendees, “I’m gonna have to butter them up a bit” by acknowledging that she is no one to them, she says. “Which I’m happy to do, because I am in awe of them and I do think they’re better than me. I desperately seek their approval.” I tell her Pitt is a huge comedy fan — he befriended Jim Jefferies because he liked his stand-up and was part of Garry Shandling’s secret weekly celebrity comedian pickup basketball game. At her career apex, Pitt probably now knows of Nikki Glaser.
“I’m not even exaggerating, that did something to my body that he would even know who I am,” Glaser says. She’s surprised not only by the potential of Pitt’s awareness, but also apparently at the frisson in her high-rise jeans. “I’m just, like, not horny anymore,” she says. For someone who talks so much about sex in her work — at the roast, she announced that her “clit has CTE” because of how vigorously she had masturbated to Brady the night before — this is like King Charles announcing he’s just not really, like, feeling the monarchy. “It used to be everything to me, and now it’s literally nothing to me,” she says, her eyebrows raising into the signature Glaser “no, seriously” position of arch sincerity. “Sex for me is like playing tag. As a kid, all you wanna do is play tag, or go on a playground. I have no interest in that now as an adult. Like, that’s exhausting.”
I try to pin down exactly when this shift happened, since, the last time we were publicly updated, Glaser’s boyfriend was pairing various sex toys with accents to more convincingly portray the guys Glaser was fantasizing about cheating on him with. “Since the special aired, you stopped being horny?” I say. “Yes,” Glaser tells me. Throughout a decade of being on and off with Convy, she explains, “I was convincing myself that he eventually was going to discover something about me that was going to disgust him in a way, so I was pushing him away.” In May, the same month her career exploded, Convy had finally convinced Glaser that he loved her unconditionally, and in doing so, eliminated the titillating potential for newness that existed if they broke up again.
There are other libido-depressing factors. Glaser’s newly high profile means she’s booking date after date on the aptly named Alive and Unwell tour, afraid the demand won’t always be there. She’s exhausted from traveling so much from her home in St. Louis, putting her backpack on the tray tables of airplanes to lean forward and sleep on. “I feel like the plane is the last place where you still have an excuse” to not be available, Glaser says of disappearing into unconsciousness in the sky. “I’m craving that people can’t get to me.”
Today, she’s in New York for a tribute to Joan Rivers at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where she’ll perform alongside people like Chelsea Handler and Aubrey Plaza. High expectations are producing high anxiety. “It feels like, ‘Oh, no. I tricked them,” Glaser says. “And now I have to live up to this thing that they maybe saw in me, one moment of greatness, but, like, I can’t keep that up.” One day recently, Glaser was crying to a friend. “I’m just a fraud,” she said. “And I didn’t even write that joke that everyone is obsessed with and compliments me for all the time.” She’s making money that she’s too busy to spend and fantasizing about buying a house in Amsterdam where she can move after she gets canceled.
Though she was wrecked by depression in January, and June, and she and Convy almost broke up for good in May, and last week a series of photo shoots that brought focus to her looks made her feel as bad as she’s felt since January, Glaser says that if she takes care of herself and gets enough rest she’s solid and can do this forever. No, really! But after the roast and the record-breaking release of the special, Glaser had to ask herself — and her therapist — “If this ain’t fun, what’s the point? Because the goal was to be at this level. And now I’m here, and I’m miserable? Like, then I should stop and start a pet rescue.”
Apparently getting everything you ever wanted is a good way to lose your desire.
GLASER HAS ALWAYS had what she calls a “part of myself that is judgemental and thinks I’m a piece of shit.”
Growing up in St. Louis, Glaser says her sister — who, to my eye, looks quite a bit like Glaser — was considered the pretty one. “Why is it someone so close to me? Like, why didn’t I get that?” Glaser thought. “I have to work so hard to get attention.”
Being funny was a good way to get it, even if Glaser’s initial place in the world of comedy was as a less distinguished member of the post-Sarah Silverman cohort of horny female comedians that included Whitney Cummings and Amy Schumer. Glaser’s career hit familiar beats: She competed on Last Comic Standing in 2006 and released her first special, Perfect, on Comedy Central in 2016. It focused on sex, obviously, but also having a baby at some point, which Glaser has since repeatedly made clear she wants no part of. I ask if she changed her mind about procreating, and she says it had never even occurred to her to want kids; it was just a rich topic to make jokes about. “I was still so trying to be what other people wanted me to be, or be what my idea of the perfect female stand-up comic was,” she says. “And it was someone who talked about having kids someday.” Glaser stands by the jokes structurally, but says, “In the first 10 or so years of my career, I didn’t really know what I cared about.” She became a breakout, if not a household name, at celebrity roasts, making jokes about people like Martha Stewart and Caitlyn Jenner. (“Such an incredible athlete. People forget just how fast you once ran from your first family to go be on a reality show.”)
This niche fostered enough fame to get Glaser onto Dancing With the Stars, but she only lasted one episode. In 2021, Glaser began hosting the reality dating show FBoy Island and The Nikki Glaser Podcast just as pandemic-era confessional audio was taking off, giving her both a bigger national platform and an outlet for the self-judgment that would fuel the more personal stand-up of Someday You’ll Die and 2022’s Good Clean Filth. “I think TikTok and podcasts and Reels have made audiences want authenticity, a stripped-down version of who people are [with] less artifice,” Glaser says. It “took years of doing it and almost being exhausted of performing and being like, ‘I can’t keep doing this. I just have to be myself.’”
Which means talking about the elements of her new status that elicit primal sensitivities. “Being on FBoy Island was a struggle at times,” Glaser says, eating a chopped salad and drinking San Pellegrino. (Glaser is vegan, sober for over a decade, and basically only drinks carbonated beverages.) The FBoys called her “Aunt Nikki,” underlining what Glaser feels is the liminal space of hotness she is stuck in — amazing-looking enough to host reality dating series, but not to actually compete on one as a 40-year-old.
Glaser spent (and continues to spend) a lot of time and energy bridging her dysmorphic gaps. There’s the thought that if she just did the right things — ate less, reformer-Pilatesed more, got the right work done on her face — Glaser could be spoken about with the longing tones she’s heard people use to describe women like Dua Lipa. A former therapist, sick of hearing Glaser express frustration about wanting to be in a different body, took a direct approach. “You aren’t a model,” she screamed at Glaser. “You’ll never be one.” Glaser says, “It was hard to hear, but it was also kind of nice?”
As a woman, she says, “You don’t get to be funny and have self-esteem. You’re not Martin Short.” Glaser has a group chat on which she shares her darkest thoughts with nine best friends lovingly accrued from fourth grade to adulthood. “I wish a car would hit me,” she said in a recent voice memo. “I would love to die right now, but I just don’t even want to because I feel like the guy doing my autopsy would be like, ‘Ew, she’s so fat.'” The group’s response: “That’s so funny, write that down.” Glaser says her friends understand that these are just terrible thoughts and not precursors to terrible action — in order to avoid worrying the chat to the point where they feel compelled to have her committed, which happened during a life-threatening anorexic episode as a teen, Glaser has promised that if she is ever actually considering hurting herself she will seek help. (The number for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is 988, which Glaser repeats several times in Someday You’ll Die, noting that they had to have a different number than 911 because if you call and tell them you’re thinking of killing yourself, they’d just say, “Call us when you do!” and hang up.)
Turning self-loathing into material is one of the things that keeps Glaser alive. “The dopamine rush that I can get is when a new joke works,” she says, noting that the chemical hits of sex and drinking are no longer available to her. “Any comedian will tell you that’s why we keep doing this, because it feels so good when something you just thought of makes a whole room burst out laughing. ‘We like you,’ is pretty much what they’re saying with their laugh. When I get most depressed is when I haven’t had time to write new material.”
She’s already thinking about what she’ll say at the Globes and the jokes she’ll craft with the team responsible for the Gronk crypto line. She’s going to have a conversation with the director about which celebrities to cut to for reaction shots, which she says are the YouTube comments of awards shows: “If the first one says, ‘This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ and it has 1,000 upvotes, you kind of go, ‘Oh, this is gonna be funny.’” Glaser is thinking close-ups of Robert De Niro, Matt Damon, and Jamie Lee Curtis would be helpful. “I’ve noticed [they] are great laughers,” she says.
Glaser is, for the first time in front of a large audience, going to be primetime-ready PG-13 — no sex (or lack thereof), no swearing. “I’m ready for a challenge,” she says. “I think as an artist, you have to keep doing things that make you deeply uncomfortable…Now, what makes me very uncomfortable is having to do a hard thing, which is be clean.” Glaser looks happy for one of a small handful of moments all day. (The others involved a full-throated endorsement of a calorie-free soda called Zevia and a detailing of the 22 Eras Tour shows Glaser loved as a get-dressed-up-to-attend-level Swiftie.”) “I’ll feel so good after I have accomplished it,” she says, hopefully.
IT ANNOYS GLASER when people tell her she shouldn’t worry about beauty or aging because she’s like Joan Rivers. “You’re about jokes, not your looks,” they tell Glaser. “And it’s, like, insulting to me and Joan,” Glaser says. “We care about our looks too, clearly.” As Glaser was writing her set for the tribute show, she read through Rivers’ old jokes and had a realization. “She felt like she was an ugly person,” Glaser says, “And she was funny because she was ugly and she didn’t like herself. And thank God she didn’t, because we got Joan.”
Glaser is nervous about her final joke tonight — it might be too much. “I’m saying this in front of her family members [who] are gonna be there,” she says. “If you don’t close strong and you close in a way that makes people groan, that’s such a risk. But I’m kind of thrilled by the risk, because Joan said the most crazy things all the time. She was constantly making people groan and saying things that were inappropriate.” We’re in the green room of the Apollo, and Glaser is — sorry, Nikki! — very hot in a tight Nineties-Versace-style black dress with gold cord detailing at the hips. She quietly walks to the back of the room of celebrities as she prepares to go onstage and deliver her inappropriate joke.
Glaser’s set gets a warm reaction from the crowd, with Rivers-ready long-tits bits and two shout-outs to her cosmetic surgeon, because “If I mention him, I do get a discount.” (It’s just fillers and Botox so far, but Glaser is dreaming of a brow lift.) She repeats a flubbed line about needing to increase the font size on her phone to take a perimenopause quiz for the edited version of the live show that will stream on Peacock, telling the audience of her ability to get a take two, “My boyfriend’s producing this.”
Then she gets to her final joke, which begins with her friends’ refrain: “Nikki, you don’t need to worry about aging. You’re the next Joan Rivers.”
“Of course, that was meant as a compliment but didn’t feel like one,” Glaser says. “Like when people tell me I look exactly like my dad — stop telling women they look like their dad. Stop. But surely, being compared to Joan, what a gift. It was actually the greatest compliment I could ever ask for, because I do want to be like Joan. I want to make people laugh by speaking the unspeakable. I want to turn pain into joy.” Then, she takes the risk: “No, most of all, just like Joan, I want to keep working up until the very end so I can die doing what I love: undergoing a risky surgical procedure.”
The audience tells her they like her and Glaser gets her dopamine hit, for now.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Hair by COREY TUTTLE. Makeup by AMANDA THESEN. Photographic assistance by LAURA BREGMAN. Photographed at THE APOLLO THEATER.
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