There’s a special kind of discomfort that comes with sitting down in front of the awards show du jour and psyching yourself up for a night of perfectly calibrated Hollywood skewering, only to…well, witness a flop of the highest order.
But that’s the opposite of what’s happened at the Golden Globes since Nikki Glaser began hosting last year, and the 2026 ceremony was no exception. Glaser delivered an opening monologue that wowed a famously tough (even if slightly buzzed) crowd.
Sure, there were a few somewhat hacky jokes in Glaser’s repertoire—at this point, I think we need a moratorium on Leonardo-DiCaprio-loves-younger-women bits…we get it!—but her opening joke about the Epstein files (“There are so many A-listers... and by “A-listers,” I do mean people who are on a list that has been heavily redacted”) was notably solid without punching down—not to mention bold as hell. And she followed it up with another political banger: “And the award for most editing goes to...CBS News! Yes, CBS News: America’s newest place to see B.S. news.” Get her again, Nikki!
From The Pitt jokes (“Noah Wyle keeps being the only doctor I’ve seen regularly for the past 35 years!”) to referring to Sean Penn as a “sexy leather handbag,” Glaser crushed it in a way I’m simply unused to at this point in awards-show history. Sure, there’s something to be said for changing up a regular host every so often, but honestly, I haven’t been so impressed by the performance of a repeat emcee since the halcyon days of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and—for the first time in years—I actually feel…kind of excited (?!) for Globes seasons to come, now that Glaser is holding the host mic. Long may she reign!
