Nikki Glaser hit her marks. From the moment she welcomed guests at the Beverly Hilton and viewers at home to “Ozempic’s biggest night,” the host of the 82nd Golden Globes set the right tone—a lighthearted mix of conviviality, self-deprecation, and snark—to satisfy both of those very different audiences. Glaser is known for, among other things, her scathing insult comedy. Yet in her tight, referential opening monologue, she assured nominees that “I am not here to roast you tonight.” Because who was she to mock such a powerful group of A-listers? “You could really do anything—except tell the country who to vote for,” Glaser cracked. Then she took a second, brief step into the ambient political anxiety: “You’ll get ‘em next time. If there is one.”
The Globes have a history of hiring envelope-pushing comedians as hosts, for better (Tina Fey and Amy Poehler skewering gendered double standards in Hollywood) and worse (Ricky Gervais griping about how boring the show he’s emceeing is bound to be). Glaser, who is somehow the Globes’ first solo female host, fits neatly into that tradition. She’s been in the public eye for more than a decade, balancing stand-up with roles in films like Trainwreck and such TV gigs as FBoy Island, the tongue-in-cheek reality dating show she hosts. But 2024 was her biggest year yet. A veteran roast comic, her searing set in Netflix’s widely seen live event The Roast of Tom Brady went viral last May. (On Brady’s delayed retirement: “It’s hard to walk away from something that’s not your pregnant girlfriend.”) Soon after, HBO released her latest special, Someday You’ll Die, which was nominated for a Globe on Sunday. (Ali Wong won.) The devilishly funny set exemplifies Glaser’s delight in touching third rails, from a crack about wishing a pregnant friend would miscarry to a discussion of gangbang porn as a metaphor for life.
But these are not the kinds of jokes an awards-show audience expects, nor would they fly on broadcast prime-time. Which helps to explain why so many popular stand-ups have blown their hosting stints; Jo Koy memorably bombed on the Globes stage last year with a misogynistic Barbie riff. Koy, who got the gig just a few weeks before the telecast, came off as lazy and ill-prepared, as though he not only hadn’t watched any of the nominated titles, but didn’t care to. Glaser, by contrast, was announced as host back in August and had been working on material ever since—a process that entailed testing jokes honed with a team of writers in front of dozens of live audiences. A scrupulous student of awards hosts past, she told Vanity Fair: “People are out for blood because they want me to do what I did at the [Brady] Roast. People who aren’t celebrities love to see celebrities taken down.” Alas, Glaser explained, “the set that people in Middle America want me to do is not the set I can do” because a comic who couldn’t also win over the stars would sink herself by failing to get laughs and claps in the room.
The approach paid off in a fun and clever, if never quite showstopping, monologue. Glaser looked genuinely psyched to be onstage, and her enthusiasm was contagious. When she did rib the celebrities in the crowd, her jibes were gentle but well crafted: “You have the most gorgeous eyelashes—on your upper lip,” she told Timothée Chalamet. Her backhanded compliment to his co-star in the long, slow sci-fi hit Dune: Part Two, Zendaya: “I woke up for all your scenes,” Nicole Kidman’s performance in the notoriously steamy Babygirl? “I give it two fingers up.”
Glaser made the most of two topics that were guaranteed to kill in a room full of Hollywood types: the absurdity of the streaming ecosystem and the collective dread of the incoming Trump administration. Emilia Pérez was accurately described as “the most audacious film to ever autoplay after Is It Cake?” There was just the right amount of political humor. “The Bear. The Penguin. Baby Reindeer,” Glaser listed. “These are not just things found in RFK’s freezer; these are TV shows nominated tonight.” She proved she wasn’t afraid to go there with the box-checking quip that Challengers was “more sexually charged than Diddy’s credit card.”
Throughout the evening, she wisely kept her interstitial bits succinct. Where another host might have actually gone through with the purposely awful Wicked-meets-Conclave musical number she started, resplendent in pink sequins and a metallic miter, Glaser cut it off with a staged phone call from her people backstage: “Wait, this sucks? This whole thing sucks? I’m embarrassing myself in front of Elton John?” In a joke that had to have been written on the fly, she noted that Mario Lopez (who came up in Kieran Culkin’s endearingly shambolic acceptance speech) had gotten more shout-outs from winners than God. She even got a slap-happy laugh in the few seconds she was given, before the final awards of the night were handed out, with the profoundly random description of Glenn Close as the “former drummer for System of a Down.”
When comedians host awards shows, they often err towards one of two extremes, either treating the gig like just another set, with jokes tailored for their fans rather than a broader audience, or delivering wholly anodyne performances, leaving little trace of their own voices. Glaser succeeded by calibrating her spicy, self-deprecating style for the task at hand. “You were in everything,” she told Glen Powell in the monologue. “Twisters, Hit Man, my head when I was having sex with my boyfriend.” It was a joke you could imagine enjoying in one of Glaser’s riotous specials—just not one of the many provocative enough to make you blush, gasp, and crack up all at once.
