How Nikki Glaser Became the New Queen of Comedy

When Nikki Glaser was making her stand-up special Someday You’ll Die, she foresaw critical acclaim in her future. “I kind of just knew it was going to be nominated for an Emmy — I hate to sound crazy,” she tells THR just hours after earning her first Emmy nomination.

The 40-year-old comedian is in the midst of a banner year. Her second HBO special has garnered over 3 million viewers since its May 11 release and was nominated for an Emmy in the prerecorded variety special category.

But even before it was released, The Roast of Tom Brady shifted everything for Glaser and her career. The livestreamed Netflix special that managed to snag its own Emmy nomination in the live variety show category premiered just six days before Glaser’s special. The live comedy show at L.A.’s Kia Forum, under the platform’s comedy festival Netflix Is a Joke, was a hit, and Glaser emerged as the night’s MVP.

“The roast was such a big moment for me, and my life changed overnight in terms of recognizability and people knowing who I am,” she says.

Glaser, a roast veteran long before the Brady special, brought her no-holds-barred brand of jokes, starting with a jab at host Kevin Hart’s movies and height (“Do you know that every morning Kevin wakes up at 4 a.m. to make a shitty movie? No, I love your movies, or, as I call them, ‘short films.’ “). She also took aim at Brady’s former teammate Rob Gronkowski (“Is it true you were the first person born with CTE? Is that real?”).

“It wasn’t intentional that the roast was going to give this special a boost — that was never planned,” Glaser says of the seemingly fated timing, which likely contributed to her special delivering the best premiere night for an HBO comedy special in the last two years.

According to Glaser, she’d been speaking it into existence for months. “I was really into manifestation in the fall, when I was putting this all together,” she explains. “I just kept saying, ‘My special that’s going to be nominated … my special that’s going to win an Emmy.’ I guess I need to win to really make this manifestation happen.”

Glaser cites her collaborators on the special as major factors in its success. Her boyfriend, Chris Convy, was an executive producer on the project. Long-standing Super Bowl halftime show director Hamish Hamilton was the special’s director. And Guy Harding served as editor — for which he, too, received an Emmy nomination.

Manifesting aside, the success of Someday You’ll Die was arguably propelled by the transparency of her humor. The hourlong stand-up set tackles Glaser’s choice to be child-free, along with her friends’ fertility struggles, and the bittersweet relationship between the two. “The material took me a while to get to a place where it was working in the way I wanted it to because of the nature of the things I was talking about,” she admits. “It’s not like I engineer a special to fit what I think people need to hear or where there’s some gap in the cultural consciousness,” Glaser explains. (Note: This interview took place before Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment exploded the internet.)

Though in previous specials, Glaser had “dipped in here and there” with jokes about not wanting kids, reactions to her material, like, “You’re going to change your mind,” or, “It’s early for you to make that kind of call,” resonated for her as a woman still in her 20s. “I couldn’t take myself seriously about it, because I thought, ‘You know, maybe I will,’ ” she says.

Now that the comedian, who’s currently on a new stand-up tour, has lived more of a life, she’s confident of both her personal and her comedic choices. “I’m kind of Malcolm Gladwell-ing this, I’m reaching close to those 10,000 hours,” she jokes of her child-free material, adding that she’s moved on to questioning, “What do I really want to say?”

The subject of fertility made it into her stand-up material because it had become a hot topic on a group chat with nine of her best friends, ranging from fellow comedians to childhood friends.

“Literally 24 hours a day, there’s someone on it that will help you through your problems,” says Glaser of the women, who take three vacations together each year.

The topic most discussed on the group chat — her friends’ wanting to have children — was one to which she couldn’t relate. “I’m usually on par with the wants and desires of my friends that I’ve had for my whole life, except here. I couldn’t fathom why you would want kids,” she admits. “And I just felt left out. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like someone who isn’t a Taylor Swift fan must feel about Taylor Swift fans,” she jokes, referencing that she’s a hard-core stan. “When people say to me, ‘I just don’t get it, will you explain it to me?’ I don’t know how to explain it to those people because the feeling that I have about Taylor Swift is beyond words.”

Nonetheless, Glaser says she “dug in deep,” asking her friends to help her better understand what they were going through, something she says she would’ve done regardless of her special. “It was really tough, because I joke about the feelings of wanting my friend to miscarry, but that’s the joke, right? That is, I am excited that she’s not going to have a baby because it means I get more friend time,” she says, explaining a bit that appears early in her routine.

“That was a whisper of a real feeling,” she says. “The way that I’ve lost friends to drugs or to toxic men — I felt like the fertility process was stealing my friends’ souls, and I was really angry about it.”

While Glaser’s jokes inevitably hit some emotionally tender spots, she emphasizes that she never wanted to throw her friends — or any woman who makes a choice for themselves on the subject — under the bus. “It was hard to have those jokes about not wanting my friends to have kids and have my friends see those jokes,” she confesses. “I wrote those jokes before I told my friends that those jokes are in the special, but they understand,” she says, emphasizing that her jokes “did not affect anything” in regard to her friends’ pregnancies.

“I just thought, ‘I need to unpack this,’ not only for me to let other women who don’t want kids feel seen but also to empathize, to understand the women who do want kids and to not just lambaste them but actually understand the root of it,” Glaser says. The experience has even led to a new bit.

“I joke onstage now that the difference between me and women who want kids is purpose. My joke is, you have a better purpose than I’ll ever have,” she explains. “My purpose now is talking to Conan O’Brien about my labia.”

This story first appeared in the August 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.