Nikki Glaser did not win a Golden Globe herself on Sunday night. “I’m first-time Golden Globe loser, Nikki Glaser,” she said after losing the award for best stand-up comedy performance to the comedian Ali Wong.
But she won something rarer: good reviews for hosting the ceremony.
Glaser — a fixture of the celebrity roast circuit who declared the show “Ozempic’s biggest night” — took on a notoriously difficult role that requires a delicate balance. She had to make fun of Hollywood and its foibles enough to entertain the viewers at home, but not so much that it alienated the A-list audience in the ballroom.
“I’m not here to roast you tonight,” Glaser said in her opening monologue. “I want you to know that. How could I, really? You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful. I mean, you can really do anything. I mean, except tell the country who to vote for.”
With the heat on a light simmer for the three-hour telecast, Glaser managed to deliver the most positively received Globes hosting of recent years, as the show has sought to lift itself out of a history of scandal and near obsolescence.
Inside the ballroom, Glaser’s jokes kept the audience laughing, and entertainment critics saw her set as something of a comeback for a show in need of one. Robert Lloyd of The Los Angeles Times wrote that “in the term of the trade, she killed.” In Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson wrote that her performance “called to mind the smooth glide of yesteryear, when many awards shows ran with a humming professionalism sincerely lacking in our current age of needless tinkering and poor hosting.”
She received plaudits from many of her colleagues in the comedy world, with the comedian Guy Branum suggesting that she host the Oscars and Jon Stewart — who hosted the Oscars twice, to lackluster reviews the first time around — weighing in approvingly.
The past two years of Globes hosting were decidedly more bumpy.
While hosting the show in 2023, Jerrod Carmichael addressed the program’s diversity crisis head-on, noting that the group that put on the Globes didn’t “have a single Black member until George Floyd died” and talking through his reluctance to take on the hosting role to begin with. Last year, the host Jo Koy’s performance fell flat, drawing enough criticism to prompt the comedian to acknowledge it the next day in an interview in which he declared the venue a “tough room.”
Glaser’s set had a much softer landing: Her jokes poked fun at Hollywood without disemboweling it, and she sprinkled in enough self-deprecation to keep the audience smiling.
The upside to losing a Golden Globe to Wong? “I just made $11,000 betting on Ali Wong on a European gambling site,” she joked.
In another dig at herself, Glaser started in on a performance that mashed up two film nominees: the movie-musical “Wicked” and “Conclave,” a drama about the selection of a new pope. She began to perform a spoof called “Pope-ular,” before acting as though a producer in her earpiece had cut her off — “Wait, this sucks?” — and suggested that she was embarrassing herself in front of Elton John.
With a rotating wardrobe of glittering gowns, Glaser made fleeting mentions of weighty or edgy topics (“The after-party’s not going to be as good this year,” she joked, referencing the abuse allegations against Sean Combs), but she mostly kept things light. She poked fun at Timothée Chalamet’s mustache, ribbed Selena Gomez’s fiancé and razzed Harrison Ford into a scowl. She revealed her personal fantasies about the actor Glen Powell, pulled Adam Sandler into a bit about Chalamet and bantered about Hollywood vapidness.
“The point of making art is not to win an award,” Glaser said. “The point of making art is to start a tequila brand so popular that you never have to make art again.”
Her material was not without Hollywood criticism, but it tended to center more around the industry’s mundanity than its malfeasance.
“Cast and crew are leading the way with 11 mentions,” she said in the middle of the show, as she introduced a scoreboard that was tracking shout-outs in winners’ speeches. “Moms are holding strong with three shout-outs.”
How about God? Zero. “No surprise in this godless town,” she quipped.
For an awards show that has weathered years of crisis and criticism, Glaser embraced enthusiasm: She seemed really, truly excited to be there. At the show’s end, she declared the job “fun and easy” — and she did not appear to be joking.
