The One Roast Joke That Nikki Glaser Would Apologize For
Nikki Glaser is hitting the comedy clubs this week, working out new material for her Golden Globes hosting gig on Sunday. But don’t expect the same blowtorch burns she delivered last year at Tom Brady’s roast.
“At a roast, you’re signing up to be there,” she told Vogue. “But the Golden Globes is different because it’s not a roast and people aren’t being paid to be there to be roasted. I have to be a little bit more gentle.”
Easy to say. But does Glaser actually have gentleness in her? “I’ll probably feel the same way I did after the roast, where I’m like, ‘I maybe shouldn’t have gone that hard.’”
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Speaking of people who didn’t sign up to be roasted, Glaser regrets one joke she told at the Brady bonfire — or at least, she acknowledges she might owe someone an apology. That’s Gisele Bündchen, Brady’s ex-wife who got caught in the crossfire that night. “I did have a joke in which I had painted her in a sexual position with her new boyfriend,” Glaser admits.
The specific joke about Bündchen’s new beau? “Tom, the only thing dumber than you saying yes to this roast was when you said, ‘Hey babe, you should try jiu-jitsu.’ That’s got to suck, dude, just knowing your ex-wife’s new boyfriend can beat your ass while eating hers.”
Glaser didn’t write the joke. “But I chose to tell it, and it was killing in the clubs, and I was still questioning it, because I’m like, she’s not there, you know?” she explained. Glaser figured that Bündchen wouldn’t mind a joke about her great sex life with her new boyfriend. “I’m rationalizing it in my head, like, ‘It’s not so bad, and it makes her look good in the end.’”
But Bündchen was blindsided by the jokes hurled her way during her ex’s comedy show. “I think that was probably one of the jokes she was referencing that she didn’t love and felt uncomfortable with,” Glaser acknowledged. “There was a part of me that was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fair.’ Like, she has a right to feel that way, and I probably do owe her an apology.”
Ironically, Glaser hates being on the other end of the jokes, which is why she’d mostly given up on roasts before the Brady event. “When you get into your late 30s as a woman on these roasts, they just start calling you old and ugly and ‘horse face’ or whatever they want to say. No matter how well I do and how much crap I talk, it would hurt my feelings every time I did a roast, no matter how great they were for my career.”
What’s Glaser’s barometer for how mean her Golden Globes jokes get? She’s letting club audiences decide. “Last night I walked onstage and was like, ‘Your laughter is going to decide whether or not I do this at the Globes,’ which I think is kind of cool for audiences,” she said. “Then if you hear a joke that you liked and I do it at the Globes, you can tell your friends, ‘I told her to do that.’”
