Nikki Glaser Returns to Host the Golden Globes With More Pressure and More Precision

As the Golden Globes approach, Nikki Glaser is chasing a feeling.

It’s a sense of ease she recognized only in hindsight, as she gets ready to host the ceremony for the second consecutive year.

“What really came across for me is, ‘That girl was having a ton of fun,’” she said of herself, after finally watching last year’s show, “and she did seem so comfortable and so confident.”

In the months that followed the ceremony, Glaser avoided revisiting the monologue altogether.

“I never had watched it,” she said. “I just did it, and I thought, ‘That went so well, and I don’t need to revisit it to find flaws or scrutinize it the way that I might, in a way that’s harsher than most people would.’”

Even when clips surfaced online, she skipped over them.

“It would come across my feed, and I would just quickly scroll past it,” she said.

It wasn’t until recently that she finally sat down to watch it. “I was just feeling like it would be a mistake not to review my work to see what I would want to focus on this year or change in my performance.”

Watching the monologue brought a mix of pride and pressure.

“I was really impressed by it,” she went on. “It lived up to exactly my memory of doing it. And it was a little bit intimidating too. I almost saw myself as someone else — like, ‘I can’t do what she did. That’s insane. That was too perfect. Am I still that person? Can I even do that?’”

It was Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, and Glaser — the 41-year-old stand-up comedian and actress — was five days out from taking the Globes stage again. What she knows for certain, she said, is what worked last time: repetition.

“I think I was so rehearsed, and I had memorized it so much and had performed it so many times that it was just one other show,” she continued. “It was really natural, and I could add different flourishes that were coming out of the moment. I was really present. And I really want to recreate that.”

Her process at this point is set, built around a writers’ room of roughly a dozen people: “It’s going over the monologue, pitching out jokes, breaking off into smaller groups, working on jokes, coming back, sharing them. Then a small group of us go out at night, and I go from set to set, and I run the jokes, and we have meetings in between to discuss what worked and what didn’t. We move things around. It’s been like that for weeks and weeks, every day.”

The group includes many of the same writers she worked with last year, along with longtime friends and comedians she’s known since the earliest days of her career.

“I’ve assembled just the funniest people that I know.”

What matters most to her is the honesty of the room.

“I love when I suggest a joke and it bombs,” she said. “Because I know then things are fair. It makes me realize, ‘OK, good. That means when I do get good feedback, it’s sincere. It’s not just coming from a place of them placating me and fake laughing.’”

So much of the work hinges on tone. And Glaser is acutely aware of how easily a joke can tip from sharp to backlash.

“I really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” she said. “Not because I don’t want to get in trouble. I just really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, or feel like I make anyone who’s already marginalized feel more so.”

That sensitivity exists alongside a body of work shaped by roast culture, where the rules and expectations are different.

“I’m open to mockery too,” she said of roasts, a space she knows well, where many of her moments have gone viral. “So, you’re like, ‘OK, I’m getting these jokes said about me, so I can dish them out, and that person who I’m joking about gets a chance to come back at me.’” At the Globes, “these people don’t have a microphone. It’s one-sided. So I have to be a little bit kinder.”

Deciding whether a joke stays, she considers, “‘Is this joke funnier than it is hurtful?’ And if it is, then maybe there’s a reason to do it.” She asks, “‘If I was a celebrity sitting there, if this was said about me, would I be sad?’”

That line of thinking recently led her to cut a joke she loved, centered on a man’s appearance. At first, she felt justified.

“I would never say this about a woman,” she said, explaining that men aren’t judged as harshly for their looks. Still, she kept turning it over. “Maybe he’s really insecure. Maybe that guy has struggled with his looks.”

Ultimately, she pulled it. “That one’s out of the set right now. And I think it’s the best joke that we’ve written, but I’m not gonna do it, because I think it’s just too mean.”

The decision runs counter to what many viewers say they want from her, Glaser explained.

“I find that people think they want me to go hard,” she said. “I think the public wants me to go in for the kill. I’ve actually seen that comment of like, ‘Nikki Glaser wouldn’t have pulled out of that joke. She would have gone even harder.’”

She disagrees. “I wouldn’t.”

And she’s convinced the audience wouldn’t like it either: “If that person looks hurt, or if that cutaway shot of that celebrity that I just made a joke about — if there seems to be any kind of disapproval on their face, I don’t care how funny that joke is, you aren’t going to like it. You are actually going to say the opposite and say she went too far. So, it’s really hard to give people what they want, because they think they want you to go hard, but the second you do it’s, ‘Who does she think she is?’ It’s always a fine line.”

Knowing where that line is comes from experience on both sides of the spotlight, she said. “I know what it’s like to have people have opinions about you and mock you for things that are seemingly out of your control…I also know what it’s like to be someone who loves watching award shows and loves comedy and wants the best joke to win, and also wants to take down these A-listers who think they’re so cool.”

Her heightened scrutiny of the material isn’t because she plans to pull back. It’s there because she’s preparing to push further in the monologue.

“Some of the people in the room have been around for a while and have gone to a lot of these award shows, and are used to the tone of them,” she said. “They can take jokes about themselves easier than maybe people who are newer to this business. So I’m lucky that there are some veterans in the room that have gone to so many of these award shows, and they know how they go. They know the deal. You get a joke made about you, the camera’s in your face — just smile and laugh along. They understand the symbiotic relationship between a comedian host and the celebrity.”

When it comes to her fashion looks, that same attention to balance carries over to how she presents herself onstage.

“You never want the outfit to be the joke,” she said. “I try to wear things that aren’t too distracting, because you want people being able to pay attention to your words and not what you’re wearing.”

The red carpet is where she allows herself more freedom. “That’s the moment where my words don’t matter, and I’m just there to look stunning,” she said.

Throughout the night, she’ll move through multiple looks, about nine — and two are costumes, one for a sketch and another tied to a special closing look.

“I hire the right people to be obsessed with it for me,” she said, explaining her approach to wardrobe. “I know it when I see it.”

The stakes feel higher this time, though, she said.

“Now I’m in competition with myself,” Glaser said. “And it’s really scary to me.” She felt she hit the mark last year — and critics agree. “I just don’t know how I could have done better for myself. It’s hard to always get A-pluses.”

Still, she’s learned not to measure the night by reaction alone. She doesn’t read reviews. “They get read to me against my will,” she said.

What counts, she added, is the effort: “All I want is to walk off that stage having done everything I could to do my best. The only reason I would ever have regrets about how anything goes, good or bad, is if I didn’t try as hard as I could. But I never did that. I always worked as hard as I could.”

If that feeling she’s chasing returns, she’ll know it. And if it doesn’t, she said, she’ll still walk away having given herself something valuable.

“No regrets,” she said. “At least that.”