Nikki Glaser Breaks Down Her Relationship With Sex and Stand-Up

You wouldn’t think an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air would be the place for Nikki Glaser to get real about sex and comedy, but here we are. Blame the spicy, salacious interview style of Terry Gross, who wanted to know how sex and Glaser’s own body become the focus of so much of her comedy. The answer? Write about what terrifies you. 

“Sex was always the scariest thing to me,” Glazer confessed. “It was always the most interesting thing.” 

Part of that fear stems from being a late bloomer, at least as Glaser defines the term. She didn’t kiss a boy until she was 18; she was a virgin until she was 21. Discomfort with her body made her scared of men and sex and, like many stand-up comics, Glaser mined her shame for material.  

“When I started doing stand-up, (I) was attracted to those kinds of unspeakable things that I was just wondering why more people don’t talk about, especially when it comes to sex,” she said. “The fear that I had around it — that I was going to be bad at it, that I was going to get made fun of, that I was going to do it wrong — it was all because I just didn’t know what was going on in there, and no one was talking about it.”

Once Glaser began exploring sex, stand-up seemed like a natural place to share what she’d learned. In her world, health classes and porn were the only other sources of sex information for young women, and “neither of those are really realistic representations of sex,” she told Gross. “So I just felt like I was filling this void that I felt growing up of information.” 

Blame part of Glaser’s anxiety on spending time around male comics who cracked wise about their own sexual encounters. “I just was observant of what men said about women around me,” she explained. “That’s where I got the idea that they talk about us. Not so much it happened to me, but I had male friends. And I wasn’t doing comedy before I was sexually active. So I was paying attention to how men talk to other men in a funny way about women. And I was like, I just don’t want that to be me.”

Glaser isn’t trying to set the record straight when she talks about sex from a female point-of-view — not exactly, anyway. “It wasn’t like I was saying, ‘Oh, you know, male comics are getting it wrong, and I need to take back the story and represent what we're going through,’” she said. “It was really just about how strange it was to me that we are doing this (sex) thing. And I thought, I’m finally going to get to say how I felt my whole life.”

“When I finally got a mic in front of my face, I just couldn’t wait to talk about the things I was observing that seemed just insane to me,” Glaser said. “The goal is just to mention the unmentionable.”