Nikki Glaser Fumbles ‘Thursday Night Football’ Jokes
Note to Amazon: Just because Nikki Glaser torched Tom Brady on his Netflix roast doesn’t make her the go-to comic for football broadcasts. As Glaser admitted in her post-game “Late Hits” segment after Amazon’s Thursday Night Football, “I want to be honest, I am pretty new to football. I used to think a two-minute warning was something a guy gave you one minute into sex.”
Maybe a line like that lands in front of a live audience, but Glaser didn’t quite seem to know how to handle the laugh void during her post-game segment, pausing for reactions from an audience that wasn’t there.
The segment is supposed to allow Glaser to share “her extra points, offensive lines, takeaways and everything you missed while watching the actual game.” But since Glaser admits she doesn’t know what’s going on, how can she tell us what we missed?
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Instead, last night at least, she leaned into the roast jokes that got her the job in the first place. And so, she immediately went after everyone on the broadcast team:
- Charissa Thompson: “I just have to say it’s so nice to finally meet the photo I show my plastic surgeon. But seriously, you are pretty intimidating. You look like the final boss at a country club.”
- Richard Sherman: “Buster Rhymes on Ozempic.”
- Andrew Whitworth: “Men’s Wearhouse Shrek.”
- Tony Gonzalez: “You look like a genie you can only summon by rubbing the crotch of a sensible Talbots pantsuit.”
- Ryan Fitzpatrick: “Or as your teammates called you, Zach Galifianakis.”
It was only downhill from there. Generic punchlines about New York and Boston. Cliches about the Jets and Patriots. One of the broadcasters audibly groaned when Glaser called the Patriots “the only thing that Ben Affleck can commit to.”
At least that was written ahead of time. Jokes about the actual game fell flat. After a clip of Jets receiver Allen Lazard getting his jersey pulled, Glaser quipped, “I haven’t seen a stretch like that since I tried to convince DiCaprio I was 25.”
Yeah, that was a stretch all right.
“Awkward” seemed to be the dominant word when the internet covered Glaser’s debut this morning. “Glaser and Thursday Night Football go together about as well as Aaron Rodgers and The Pat McAfee Show,” wrote Awful Announcing. “You can’t really enjoy it, but you can’t turn it off either.”
Social media wasn’t any kinder.
In Glaser’s many talk-show appearances after the Tom Brady roast, she talked about her tireless preparation, workshopping punchlines in front of live audiences to hone her jokes and jabs. After the Jets/Patriots game, we get to see what Glaser sounds like when she has to call audibles. Some of the jokes were solid, but with no audience to laugh at them, Glaser looked like a rookie quarterback trying to adjust to the speed of the NFL.
Maybe it’s not time to send her to the bench, but Amazon has to make some half-time adjustments.
