During the Golden Globe Awards red carpet rollout Thursday, on a sun-kissed morning at the Beverly Hilton, Nikki Glaser — the comedian tasked with taming the perpetually tough room at this Sunday’s ceremony — emerged boisterous and confident despite some grim recent history. It was only last year, after all, that another stand-up comic, Jo Koy, hired just 10 days before the show, lost the audience early in his monologue and never recovered. The reviews savaged him. “Wildly offensive” was one of the milder observations.
“It wasn’t the greatest night for him or us,” Glenn Weiss, who along with Ricky Kirshner are again serving as executive producers and showrunners for this year’s Globes, admits to Gold Derby.
By contrast, Glaser got the call for the gig in late summer and has had plenty of time to prepare. And prepare she has.
“I think that [Koy] was in a different circumstance,” Glaser says in an exclusive interview. She said that she watched his monologue to gauge pitfalls to avoid. “I learned that he didn’t really establish who he was to the crowd. … He’s used to performing for sold-out arenas, so he assumed everyone would know. Maybe he didn’t think about the fact that Hollywood elites aren’t going to see comedy shows. So I’ve definitely approached this like, ‘I’ve got to tell them who I am right out of the gate so they kind of know the context of why I’m here.”
Glaser is the comedian of the moment after receiving rave notices in May for her handiwork on the live Netflix roast of legendary pro football quarterback Tom Brady. There was also her springtime hourlong HBO comedy special, Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die, which landed a Golden Globe nomination for comedy special. The New York Times recently named her Comedy Person of the Year. Glaser, a working comedian for nearly two decades, has also appeared on the roasts of Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, and Rob Lowe and guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live!
So if she kills it at the Globes, Glaser won’t exactly be an overnight sensation. But if her hosting stint doesn’t leave ’em laughing, it certainly won’t be from lack of effort. She has tried out parts of her monologue at comedy clubs in and around Los Angeles and claims to have run it “nearly 100 times — even on road in Birmingham and Memphis and New York. And I’m so excited to just share these jokes with the people that they’re about and with people who get them. It’s kind of hard to tell Middle American audiences a kind of esoteric joke about the Holocaust, but here they’ll get it.”
Weiss agrees that Glaser gets the assignment. “Nikki understands the dynamic and more importantly has been with us for four months now so we’ve really been able to do a lot of work with her, and she’s great. She’s really doing her homework. She’s well prepared. And I just think from the top of the show, the monologue, this is going to be a show that’s very well received at home. … And we’re going to hit it quick. We’re not going to waste a lot of time on an open. Right at the top of the show, we’re going to get the best of Nikki. It’s going to hit really early and really well.”
Glaser got a jump on working the room while navigating the press line at Thursday’s meet-and-greet. Clad in a shimmering custom metallic silver power suit, she cut a dramatic figure. She also oozed charisma in a way the previous year’s host never did. She felt more like the latest version of Ricky Gervais.
She tells Gold Derby that she’s approaching the night without fear. She’s doing the same prep she would do for working a roast. And that’s saying something.
“I hired the same writers, the same kind of core team to go out and running around [with] every night, doing the set four or five times a night. … The monologue has been through many versions, but that’s what I’ve always done for roasts, is just run it to death and just hope they work in this crowd — the people you’re actually writing the jokes about.”
And if it doesn’t work?
“I’ll go back to my life, because no matter what happens it will be forgotten,” she says. “I’ve gone back and reviewed pretty much every comedy monologue from the Oscars to the Emmys to the Golden Globes over the past 15 years, and I’ve forgotten about all of the people who were hosting, even though at the time I loved and celebrated it. People will forget Nikki Glaser hosted and whether I killed it or not. In this industry, we move on so fast. Good or bad, people will move on and nothing really matters in the end.”
On the other hand, once her monologue is done at the show, Glaser admits she’ll be overcome with relief. “When you watch it on Sunday and see me turn and walk, just know that it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had in my body in my entire life — if it goes well.”
Weiss and Kirshner are just thrilled to know they’ve tabbed a host who is taking the job so seriously.
“We’ve done a lot of awards shows and worked with some amazing hosts over the years,” says Kirshner, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Note: Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Eldridge and Penske Media Corporation, which owns Gold Derby.
