Nikki Glaser

Kirkwood, Kansas, and a fifteen-year apprenticeship

Nicole Rene Glaser was born in Cincinnati on 1 June 1984 and grew up mainly in Kirkwood, a suburb on the western edge of St. Louis. She read English literature at the University of Kansas and started performing stand-up at eighteen, so the degree and the apprenticeship ran in parallel. She reached the finals of Last Comic Standing while still a student — exposure that arrived years before she had an hour worth filming, and which did not translate into a career for a long time afterwards.

The 2010s went into infrastructure rather than fame. She co-hosted the podcast You Had to Be There with Sara Schaefer from 2011 to 2014, took small parts in Trainwreck in 2015 and I Feel Pretty in 2018, and got her own Comedy Central series, the sex-themed talk show Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, in 2016. Her first hour, Perfect, arrived on Comedy Central the same year. SiriusXM carried her daily show You Up? from 2018 to 2020, and The Nikki Glaser Podcast ran from 2021 to 2025.

Hosting work filled the gaps and taught her the skill that would later matter most: holding a live format together. She fronted a revived Blind Date on Bravo in 2019, FBoy Island from 2021 to 2023 and its CW spin-off Lovers and Liars in 2024, competed on Dancing with the Stars in 2018 and The Masked Singer in 2022. She has been sober since 2011, a fact her later material keeps returning to.

The roast that changed the recognisability problem

Three specials built steadily on the first: Bangin' for Netflix in 2019, Good Clean Filth for HBO in 2022, and Someday You'll Die for HBO in 2024. The work was well reviewed and largely known to people who already followed comedy. That changed with Netflix's live Roast of Tom Brady in 2024, where her set was the one that circulated for weeks afterwards. Her own summary of the aftermath was that the roast was a big moment and her life changed overnight in terms of recognisability.

Someday You'll Die converted the attention into industry standing. It won her the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy/Variety – Specials in 2025, and she has collected nominations from the Primetime Emmys, the Grammys, the Critics' Choice Television Awards and the Golden Globes. Time included her in its Time 100 list for 2026.

The two modes — the roast set and the confessional hour — run on the same engine. She reaches the harshest available line about herself before anyone in the room can get there, which is what makes the lines about other people land as something other than cruelty.

Three Januaries at the Beverly Hilton

Glaser hosted the 82nd Golden Globe Awards on 5 January 2025, the first woman to host the ceremony solo. The reviews were strong enough that the return booking was never in doubt, and she hosted the 83rd ceremony on 11 January 2026.

The 2026 monologue ran around ten minutes and went at Wicked's running time, Leonardo DiCaprio's dating history, Timothée Chalamet's preparation for Marty Supreme and CBS News, opening on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The Hollywood Reporter's review of the night was headlined on the point that she outshone the telecast around her; Rolling Stone called the monologue a master class in the form.

In 2026 CBS confirmed she would host for a third time, on 10 January 2027. Three consecutive years makes her the closest thing the ceremony has had to a resident host since its relaunch, and it fixes one immovable date in every year's touring calendar.

Good Girl, shot in her home town

Her fifth hour, Good Girl, premiered on Hulu on 24 April 2026, filmed in St. Louis. The production deliberately broke with stand-up convention: Hamish Hamilton, who has directed the Grammys, the Oscars and fifteen years of Super Bowl halftime shows, directed it; Done+Dusted produced, with David Jammy as executive producer and Chris Convy as showrunner; Elina Billingsley designed an evolving set and Bobby Dickinson lit it.

The hour opens and closes with an original song, Good Girl, co-written by Glaser with Daniel R. Monahan and Tim Convey Jr., and she makes a pop-concert entrance to her own hype track. The body of the special is chaptered, with lighting shifts marking the turns. The material covers ageing, beauty maintenance, cosmetic procedures and the price of staying relevant as a woman in public — the tension between being instructed to behave and needing to say the unsayable for a living.

Laughing Place rated it four out of five and called it one of the sharpest stand-up hours in recent memory; it carries a TV-MA rating and is emphatically not family viewing.

The Stunning Tour and the economics under it

The tour was announced on 6 January 2026, with a presale the following day and general sale on 9 January at 10am local time through Ticketmaster. Pollstar counted 32 dates; the announcement listed 29 cities across North America and Europe, all of it billed as new material rather than the Good Girl hour.

Europe came first: Le Trianon in Paris on 1 June, the Eventim Apollo in London on 5 June, and two shows at Dublin's 3Olympia Theatre on 6 June. The North American leg opened on 1 August at Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena in Atlantic City and runs through to 2 December at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, with stops including Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, Charlotte and Columbus.

The routing is notable for what it avoids. Despite the profile, this is a theatre and performing-arts-centre tour rather than an arena run, with casino rooms filling out the schedule. The commercial logic is visible in the previous tour's closing figures: two nights at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis sold 7,368 tickets for a combined gross of $457,816. She is represented by Nick Nuciforo at UTA and keeps a concurrent Las Vegas residency with David Spade at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, with a documented date there on 22 May 2026.

Where she stands in September 2026

The current position is unusual for a stand-up: a network awards show on retainer, a streaming special four months old and well received, and a tour that has been running since June with three months still to go. None of it depends on the others, which is the point — the Globes job renewed after the first outing, the special was commissioned off the specials that preceded it, and the ticket sales predate both.

What has not changed is the material's centre of gravity. The subjects are her own body, her own ageing, her own sobriety and her own status, worked over in public in front of rooms of two and three thousand people, night after night, in cities she will return to next year.