Nikki Glaser’s Emmy Nominations Made Her Finally Confront Her Imposter Syndrome

On the morning of July 17, Nikki Glaser’s phone was flooded with texts from people all sending the same word: Emmy . It took the comedian a beat to understand.

“I thought maybe I was presenting at the Emmys or something,” she told TheWrap. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m nominated?’ Like, someone had to actually say that to me before I understood.”

That’s how shocked the performer behind HBO’s “Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die” was by her special’s two nominations. This year, Glaser is the only female-led show to be nominated in the Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) category, where the other nominees feature Billy Joel, Dave Chappelle, Trevor Noah and Dick Van Dyke. Her editor Guy Harding was also nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming for the special.

“Someday You’ll Die” marks the comedian’s most vulnerable work to date. A deep dive into Glaser’s own “toxic shame,” the special re-contextualizes her biggest insecurities in increasingly dark and absurd ways, such as joking about offering to pay for her friend’s abortion because she doesn’t want to be alone. “You want to know how dark it gets? I dare you to love me after this,” Glaser said. The performance scored Max’s largest streaming audience for a comedy special and delivered the best premiere-night viewership for an HBO comedy special in more than two years.

The show’s success inspired Glaser to reexamine her relationship with both her work and herself. After the premiere, she picked up “The Imposter Cure” by Dr. Jessamy Hibberd because, as she said, she’s experienced imposter syndrome her entire life “and I’m really sick of having it. Once you start getting things like official awards, or even being considered for them, you can’t really argue with it anymore. You can’t walk into the Emmys feeling like you don’t belong there. You need to really own this moment.”

Suddenly, she felt that her long-standing feelings of professional insecurity felt juvenile. “It’s becoming boring to me,” she explained. “It’s a talking point that I’ve exhausted to death and it informs a lot of my comedy, too. I’ve gone as far as I
can thinking I’m a fraud and I’m tired of it.”

The nominations for “Someday You’ll Die” come on the heels of another major moment for the comedian. Glaser emerged as the standout performer on Netflix’s “The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady,” a special that received 13.8 million views during its first week and is nominated in the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category. Glaser likened the roast to her own Olympics: It’s an event that only occurs every couple of years, and it requires a great deal of practice. Though she was pleased by her roast performance, the overwhelmingly positive response she received caught her off guard and led to “a little bit of a depression” for the comedian who prefers to think of herself as an underdog.

“I felt like Simone Biles. Now whenever I go anywhere people are going to expect me to perform a beam routine,” Glaser joked, adding that that feeling was another reason why she is determined to change her approach to her career. “Sometimes it is really hard. It’s a lot of pressure and it feels like you just want to disappear and not have to keep this ball up in the air,” she said. “But that’s what the business is. I’m trying to enjoy this high point in my career instead of thinking about how it’s going to go away someday.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue here .

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