Nikki Glaser doesn’t hold back while roasting celebrities — but it’s not so easy being on the other side of the joke.
“If you go into [a roast] thinking, ‘I’m not going to take it personally, this is fine,’ you are sorely mistaken,” Glaser, 41, admitted while appearing on SiriusXM’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa” before hosting the 2026 Golden Globes set for Sunday, January 11. “At these roasts, we say things that are so cruel that even I go into them a lot of times thinking no one’s going to say something about me [that] I haven’t thought about myself. But they often do.”
Glaser continued, “They bring up something where you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know I looked like that. I didn’t know my ass was that flat. I didn’t know that resonated with a crowd of thousands of people — that I look like Larry Bird or whatever it is.’ And you’re just like, ‘Oh, crap.'”
Glaser was one of many celebs who participated in the 2019 Comedy Central roast of Alec Baldwin, during which Blake Griffin took to the podium and declared, “Larry Bird is here — I mean, Nikki Glaser is here.”
The comedian admitted to Ripa she’s had her feelings “deeply hurt by a roast,” but she’s still had “to sit up there and laugh and act like I’m having fun.”
“At the afterparty, I’m in the bathroom crying and texting my injection lady to be like, ‘Get the bird out of my face,'” she teased. “Drain the bird. Free him from his cage.”
When Ripa assured Glaser that she doesn’t look like Bird, Glaser joked back, “No, no, I fixed it.”
According to Glaser, the toughest pill to swallow isn’t the joke itself, but the audience’s reaction.
“People can make jokes,” she explained on Wednesday. “But when the audience gets it in a way where you’re like, ‘Oh no, this isn’t just one guy writing a joke behind the scenes about one picture of me found on Google Images. This is something resonating with the audience seeing me in person.’ That’s when it really hurts. When a joke kills in a way where you realize everyone in the culture accepts this premise — that can be really painful.”
Several years after the Baldwin roast, Glaser admitted to Vogue that she’s not a fan of being roasted. “I still think about some of the jokes that have been made about me from roasts six years ago. I still see them when I look in the mirror,” she admitted in January 2025, once again referencing Griffin’s comment. “The response from the crowd was so overwhelming; like, it killed so hard that I was like, I can’t deny that.”
She added, “That was the first time I ever went and got injections in my face in a way that was like, ‘Let’s restructure things.'”
Glaser also recalled Pete Davidson delivering a joke about her body that stuck with, though she didn’t specify where or when the roast took place.
“I think Pete Davidson had one about how I don’t have an ass … I mean, I knew I didn’t and I know I don’t, but the fact that he had really thought about it, or maybe someone wrote the joke for him and he didn’t have to think about it at all, but he at least had to be like, ‘That works for her,'” she told the outlet.
Glaser spoke to Vogue shortly before hosting the Golden Globes for the first time, and she’ll return to the awards show on Sunday. Before the 2025 ceremony, Glaser was mindful about her approach to poking fun at certain stars who would be in the crowd.
“I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable or feel like they were called out. You know, I watch these monologues and I see the host say, like, ‘Timothée Chalamet is here,’ and then everyone applauds and you just see Timothée in the shot being like, ‘What’s coming down the pike?'” she explained. “There are so many factors to consider that I’m not used to with regular stand-up, where it only matters if the audience laughs or not. It’s not based on one person’s reaction who the camera’s going to go to afterwards.”
