How Nikki Glaser Became Toast of the Roast (2024)

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Photo: Michelle Groskopf/Michelle Groskopf

As I pull up to Bally’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, right on the border of Nevada and California, I’m greeted by a 30-foot version of the comedian Nikki Glaser. The big-screen marquee is advertising her “Alive and Unwell” tour, and somewhere inside, past a maze of slot machines and solitary gamblers, she’s getting ready for her sold-out Memorial Day weekend show. “Are you going?” my cabdriver asks. “She’s going to be a big deal after the roast.”

By “the roast,” he means The Roast of Tom Brady, which recently aired on Netflix to nearly 14 million viewers in its first week. Glaser was quickly, if unofficially, deemed the night’s winner. Kevin Hart, the event’s host, was visibly moved by her set, nearly choking up when he came onstage after she walked off. “That’s the beauty of roasting,” he said to the crowd. “There’s an art to it, and when you get it right, goddamn it’s amazing.” It’s true: Watching her — one of the only women on a decidedly laddish stage — felt sort of like watching a woman going into the boys’ locker room and politely brutalizing them. “I get it,” she said breezily to Brady at one point, referring to his first, failed attempt to retire. “It’s hard to walk away from something that’s not your pregnant girlfriend.”

Glaser has been in the business for just over 20 years. She started doing stand-up when she was 18, first at an open mic at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she briefly went to school, then, after she moved to L.A. in 2006, at various bars and clubs that would give her stage time. (For extra money, she nannied — at one point for Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann.) That led to an appearance on Last Comic Standing the same year, after which she headed out on the road, where she would spend the next decade relentlessly performing, sometimes six days a week. (“My goal in life,” she told this publication in 2011, “is to never nanny again.”) She was invited to do her first roast — of Rob Lowe — in 2016 by producers at Comedy Central, who’d seen her on Jeff Ross’s show The Burn. Since then, she’s had a smattering of high-profile projects, but each one has been notably short-lived. There was Not Safe With Nikki Glaser on Comedy Central (canceled after one season) and FBoy Island on HBO Max (canceled after two. In case you were wondering, the premise of the latter was to stick three women on a tropical island with 24 men — 12 “nice guys” looking for love and 12 “FBoys” there only to compete for cash). She appeared on Dancing With the Stars in 2018 and was first voted off. But she kept getting invited back to do roasts, often as one of the few women on the stage. The same year as Dancing With the Stars, there was Bruce Willis’s roast. (“I know you as the star of every DVD you kind of just find on the street,” she said to a red-faced Willis.) And a year later, Alec Baldwin got on the dais. “That time, I was really speaking from What do I actually think about these people, rather than What’s the funniest joke?” she tells me in the greenroom a few hours before her performance.

She was asked to do her Max special, Someday You’ll Die, a year ago. Conveniently, it came out on May 11, six days after the roast. She’d planned to do just two weeks of press, but then many of the same people who had said “no” to having her on their shows suddenly started calling her back. She was, in rapid succession, invited onto Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Today with Hoda and Jenna, The Howard Stern Show, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, whom she told she felt like “Taylor Swift for a day.” As soon as all that finished, she promptly left Los Angeles for her tour.

Over the next several months, Glaser will be performing in theaters and casinos like this one across the country. Her set, like the special, focuses on what it’s been like to reach her 40s. On her decision to not have children, she jokes, “I just don’t feel like devoting my free time to something that could marry a DJ.”

“Finding a way to be yourself onstage is so hard,” she tells me in her raspy, speedy voice before asking her makeup artist to take her blush down a bit. It’s taken time to get there. “When I was four years into comedy, it started emerging in little places, and I’d be like, Oh, what did I just do? But people really responded to it.” She cites Sarah Silverman as one of her major inspirations: “She seems really nice but says crazy things,” she says. “I like being met where people still like me and are rooting for me, even when I can show sides of myself that are cuckoo.” It’s funny that given Glaser’s talent for publicly skewering people, her likability seems rather important to her. She’s wary of alienating people. In her comedy, she doesn’t often address politics beyond vague allusions to the state of things or a few jokes about abortion that are legible as pro-choice. She tells me earnestly, leaning forward in her chair, “I think a lot about death and what people would say about me, and I just want people to be like, ‘She was really nice.’ I know that sounds crazy, but that’s my favorite compliment, as opposed to funny.” She says she didn’t mean to apologize so many times during the Brady roast. (After almost every joke, she turned to him and said “I’m sorry.”) “I practiced my set like 55 times,” she tells me. “Different variations of it, and I never once apologized in any of those. But when I got up there, I literally felt bad.”

After her makeup is done, she changes out of her yoga pants and Taylor Swift concert T-shirt. (She’s gone to the Eras Tour 12 times this past year. In fact, “One of the best things in my life is being a Swiftie. It brings me the most joy. It’s right up there with being an aunt, and I’m not kidding you,” she says, then adds, “Actually, it might beat being an aunt.”) She puts on a short white dress and looks through an assortment of very high heels. Onstage, she talks often about “f*ckability” and fearing that her sex appeal will decline as she ages. (At the show, the man behind me cracked up when she compared her puss* to a used car.) “I didn’t know how to be sexy, or even lean into that, or that I could even market myself in that way, until I was 35,” she tells me. “Like, Oh, I can dress like a pop star because that’s what I want. It caters to the male gaze, which isn’t a bad thing in this business. But then you do start to worry, If that goes away, what happens?”

She, more than most, understands that “things going away” is basically what happens in her line of work. Since the Brady special, she says, everyone has been telling her everything is different. “I’m like, ‘Mm-mm,’” she says with a skeptical tone. “It was fun being the belle of the ball, but now it’s kind of cooled off, and thank God.” She’s more okay with things staying as they were, she says. She’d like to do SNL in theory, but when she really thinks about it, she gets nervous. “It would be a lot of pressure and work. So I’m sort of like — I just did a thing that people are happy about. Can I just tour now? I’m comfortable touring, I don’t get nervous touring.” In the meantime, she’s adjusting to one component of her ever-so-slightly new reality — getting recognized, after all of her years working, at Pilates. “The other day, a guy afterward was like, ‘By the way, huge fan.’ He was next to me the whole time. I was like, ‘I literally would’ve tried harder if I knew you knew I was Nikki Glaser.’”

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