Photo: Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO
Four minutes into her new HBO special, Someday You’ll Die, Nikki Glaser tells a supremely dark joke about women experiencing age-related infertility. She says how unfair it is that their biology precludes them from being parents when they’re best equipped to be good ones, then contrasts their experience with a hypothetical teen who gets pregnant after being “raped by her uncle”: “God’s like, ‘Here’s twins.’ You’re like, ‘What the fuck?! Are you serious? I’m over here trying!’” It’s not wildly out of the norm in the context of Glaser’s act. Her material often gravitates toward macabre and risqué topics that might warrant a content warning in non-comedy contexts. A few minutes later, Glaser waves at this idea by launching into a tangent about how these sorts of content disclaimers have become ubiquitous in stand-up, too, through a joke about how suicide is a more dignified way to die than severe illness.
“I know suicide is a scourge on our nation, and it’s a subject that’s a little touchy, but I actually feel like I have a right to talk about it because … I’m gonna kill myself someday,” she jokes. It’s a misdirect that allows her to zoom out on the larger trope she wants to tackle. “That’s what comedians do a lot of times. They’ll caveat a joke they’re scared to tell because they don’t want to get canceled.” Glaser doesn’t name names, but a few high-profile examples instantly come to mind: Shane Gillis, who preempted his bit about people with Down syndrome in his February 2024 SNL monologue by saying, “I do have family members with Down syndrome,” and Dave Chappelle, who attempted to make his jokes about transgender people more palatable in his 2021 special The Closer by telling a story about his friendship with transgender comedian Daphne Dorman. “You’ve seen this before,” Glaser continues. “There’ll be a comedian that has, like, a really bad take on trans people, and they’ll do all these jokes, and they go, ‘I can do these jokes, actually, because I have a trans sister … radio, and I listen to Fox News on it, so I’m misinformed and I’m an asshole.”
The logic of why audiences take comfort in these sorts of disclaimers is also puzzling to Glaser. “If I were to say right now, ‘Guys, I’m going to do some rape jokes,’ you might go, ‘Go back to the suicide stuff,’” she speculates. “But if I said, ‘But I can do these jokes, because I’ve been raped,’ you’d go, ‘Oh, thank God she was raped! I thought she hadn’t been raped. Thank God she was brutally raped! Now I can relax. I was nervous before.’” It’s a testament to the unsparing nature of Glaser’s comedy that, even as she’s needling comedians for not having the courage to stand behind their harder-to-stomach material, she can’t help but double down on hard-to-stomach material herself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with holding an audience’s hand by delicately prefacing a joke, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with content warnings in general. But as Glaser demonstrates in Someday You’ll Die, if a joke is well-written enough, these caveats are little more than trimmable fat.
