If you wanted to promote your upcoming stand-up special, you’d be hard-pressed to generate as much buzz as Nikki Glaser did, delivering the set of the night during the live Roast of Tom Brady on Netflix just days before her newest solo hour, and second for HBO, dropped this past weekend. Even if the other comedians or athletes at the Brady roast had tried to come after Glaser, they likely couldn’t land barbs about her as hard as the ones she can tell, and does!
The Gist: Don’t let the title fool you.
While Glaser does grapple a bit with her own mortality (and ours, collectively), this hour very much falls in line with the explicit sexual nature of her observational humor that has run through her previous TV work on Comedy Central (Not Safe with Nikki Glaser), Netflix (Bangin‘), and HBO/Max/The CW, where she released Good Clean Filth two years ago and has hosted and executive-produced both Fboy Island and its spinoff, Lovers and Liars (FKA FGirl Island).
Glaser is very much a lover but not so much a liar, continuing to choose brutal honesty when it comes to discussing her dismay at her female friends choosing to have kids, how she thinks about her own aging and eventual death, and all of the sexual fantasies she wants to indulge in while she still can.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: As blunt as Sarah Silverman or Michelle Wolf, but with the timing of Wendy Liebman.
Memorable Jokes: Before she even gets to joking about her own death, Glaser opens up by revealing her darkest inner thoughts about her pregnant friends, jokingly wishing she could pay for their abortions, or failing that, induce miscarriages through a variety of deviously obvious methods. She’s more than clear on why she doesn’t want to have kids of her own, too, whether or not the world is ending, and even if “your kids will take care of you” when you get old. When a man shouts out from the audience as if he may volunteer as her caretaker, Glaser quickly retorts that famous women get gay men to serve in that capacity.
Instead of worrying about who’ll take care of her in her old age, Glaser reveals she indulges in suicidal ideation from time to time. To the point where she even imagines viewers of this special thinking back to this moment 40 years from now as a reference point. Her mom might not enjoy these jokes, but the audience gives Glaser a cheer when she draws this comparison between suicide and euthanasia: “Guns are easier to get in this country than compassion, so what am I supposed to do?”
But in the meantime, Glaser wishes to focus her attention and ours upon her ongoing quest for sexual gratification. Here she goes into graphic details about the role-playing she engages in with her longtime on-again off-again boyfriend. They can get really dark, really fast, implying in one early bit a scenario involving incest and rape. But she gets even more explicit later in the hour, describing how her boyfriend blindfolded her so she could imagine she were having sex with multiple partners. She makes light of it, joking: “I cheated on my boyfriend with my boyfriend,” before doubling-down in a closing act-out using the stool onstage to compare her sexual fantasies to the grim realities for women, whether or not they’re pursuing a career in show business.
Our Take: “What am I, Taylor Swift?”
That’s how Glaser reacted to the adoration she received from the crowd in Seattle as she walked onstage. She commands the stage with confidence and glamour, and wows us late in the hour when she bursts into song while taking us back through the saga of Susan Boyle’s 2009 appearance on Britain’s Got Talent (Glaser also sings and co-wrote the music playing over her special’s end credits).
But no Swiftie could mentally prepare if Swift wrote lyrics as sexually explicit or depressingly dark as anything Glaser jokes about in this hour.
To her credit, Glaser mentions the 988 hotline multiple times if anyone feels triggered.
And the comedian also takes on her fellow comedians for relying on the crutch of claiming they have a personal connection to their most offensive jokes, as if that’s enough of a rationalization. “Comedians are scared of getting canceled so they have to do these caveats,” Glaser alleges, singling out one comedian (unnamed) for their anti-trans jokes, and forcing us to confront what it means to go along with similar conceits. “Can you transition into less of a cunt, is that possible?” she asks her peer.
As a skilled roaster on both Comedy Central and now Netflix, Glaser also knows how to take a joke as well as she can dish them out. You probably cannot come up with zingers about her physical appearance that’ll knock her down any more than any of the lines she delivers about her looks in this hour. Which also serves as an entry point for Glaser to critique how Hollywood and society in general frown upon women of a certain age or even those who are not “conventionally hot.” Which brings her back to that viral moment of fame for Boyle, and how rewatching the video just reminds her how quick we are to judge someone solely based on their looks.
For her part, Glaser is looking forward to the moment she ages out of our sexual gaze. Until then, there’s no shame in her game as she works the stool like a stereotypical male comedian out of the 1990s, exposing our double standards once more.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Toward the end of her physically-intensive closer, Glaser wonders aloud: “Why is this your career at the age of 39?” Yet few of her peers in gender or age could do what she’s doing, whether it’s singing her own songs or pulling off punchlines such as “I don’t have the kegels to get into some Claussens.” This is her moment. And she’s making the most of it.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
