Nikki Glaser Redeems the Golden Globes Opening Monologue With Spicy, Silly Roasts
Nikki Glaser pulled off the impressive feat of opening an awards show with a genuinely delightful monologue, keeping things just spicy enough as she roasted the assembled celebs at the 2025 Golden Globe Awards.
Glaser started strong by welcoming the crowd to the 82nd Golden Globes, “Ozempic’s biggest night!” She then eased any nerves in the crowd by reassuring them, “I’m not here to roast you tonight. I want you to know that, and how could I? You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful — you could really do anything… I mean, except tell the country who to vote for.”
As Glaser noted, the Globes are a chance to “celebrate the best of film and hold space for television.” She cracked that some of this year’s movie nominees, Wicked, Queer, and Night Bitch are “not just words Ben Affleck yells when after he orgasms.” And that TV nominees The Bear, The Penguin, and Baby Reindeer are “not just things found in RFK’s freezer.”
Glaser even pulled off a Diddy joke, cracking that Challengers was more “sexually charged” than the disgraced mogul’s credit card. “I’m upset too,” she quipped, “the afterparty’s not going to be as good this year. But we have to move on! A ‘Stanley Tucci Freak-Off’ doesn’t have the same ring to it — no baby oil this year, just lots of olive oil.”
Glaser fared notably better with her monologue than last year’s host, stand-up Jo Koy. Koy was admittedly a last-minute hire who only had a couple of weeks to prepare for the gig after other comics turned down the offer. Still, his jokes about Barbie (a movie “based on a plastic doll with big boobies”) and Taylor Swift’s presence on football telecasts infamously drew jeers and boos from the crowd.
(Koy largely stuck by his performance, though did express some regret over his crack about Swift, which he insisted was meant to skewer the NFL instead.)
Glaser, for her part, secured the Globes gig partly thanks to her standout performance at Netflix’s roast of Tom Brady. In interviews ahead of tonight, Glaser suggested she would lean on those same instincts while always remembering the Globes are an awards show and not a roast: “I understand the assignment that I’ve been given,” Glaser told CNN.
Glaser lived up to that promise, getting in some clever barbs while generally keeping things dumb and fun. She complimented Timothée Chalamet’s mustache or, rather, the “gorgeous eyelashes on your upper lip.” And she thanked Keith Urban for “playing guitar around the house so much” that Nicole Kidman wants to “make 18 movies a year.”
Glaser heaped high praise on Wicked even though she previously knew nothing about it because “I had friends in high school.” And lauded Emilia Pérez as “the most audacious, groundbreaking film to ever autoplay after Is It Cake?”
To wrap things up, Glaser turned to the general ridiculousness of awards shows and the entertainment industry, cracking, “If you do lose tonight, please just keep in mind that the point of making art is not to win an award. The point of marking art is to start a tequila brand so popular that you never have to make art again.”
