Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes Monologue Had Hard Punchlines and Impressions

When I started following Nikki Glaser in early December as she began putting together her Golden Globes monologue, she planned a joke that never made it into Sunday’s awards show about shouting out Harrison Ford and then saying, “Harrison Ford is here to show us a cool rock he found.”

It was more off-kilter than her usual material, and it absolutely delighted Glaser. She told her staff that this was a different kind of laugh they should embrace: “Don’t be scared to be weird.”

You saw evidence of this in her stellar monologue at the Globes that included the kind of hard punchlines she is known for, including a good insult of Paramount+, a joke about the effect of Sean Combs’s arrest on the after-party and a sharp feminist shot at the Globes for ignoring women for best director in past years (two, Coralie Fargeat and Payal Kapadia, are nominated this year).

But there was also a new bit added in the last week: an impression of Adam Sandler pronouncing Timothée Chalamet’s name that was just pure silliness. She even got Sandler to join in. Glaser doesn’t usually do impressions, but she committed and it went over really well, adding to a celebratory, fun tone to kick the night off.

Glaser had struggled over the question of whether to mention stars in the audience before inviting applause. She wanted to include as many as possible but didn’t want to slow things down. She ended up mentioning several in a list for a joke poking fun at movie stars moonlighting in television.

She left some very funny leering jokes out of the monologue that had been working, though if there was one joke that worked less well in the room than at a table among writers in a club, it was when Glaser said, “I think I have seen more peacocks in my life than actual shows on Peacock.” If there was a joke that crushed in every club she tried it out in, it was probably when she mentioned a few nominees: “‘Wicked,’ ‘Queer,’ ‘Nightbitch,’” then added “Not just things Ben Affleck yells after sex.” It killed again.