Nikki Glaser on reality shows vs. actual reality and the empathy she brings to FBoy Island

Nikki Glaser. // photo courtesy the artist

Comedian Nikki Glaser is omnipresent. Be it her specials for Comedy Central, Netflix, and HBO, stints on her own reality show, Welcome Home, Nikki Glaser? and  as the host for the hilarious FBoy Island, she is everywhere, and everywhere she is, she’s amazing. Seriously. Did you see her kill it on The Masked Singer earlier this year or as a guest host for Jimmy Kimmel Live last summer? Have you seen last year’s Good Clean Filth special on HBO?

Even if you haven’t, catching her show this Sunday, October 29, at the Lied Center is a must for fans of stand-up. Her frank and open comedy is hilarious, and if you follow Glaser’s career or social media, the comic feels like she’s one of your besties living her absolute best life. As a matter of fact, I had to remind myself when preparing for this interview, “You don’t actually know her, Nick,” and I said as much when we spoke by phone earlier this week, asking if she ever has people act as if they know her.

“That’s kind of the goal, honestly,” Glaser answers. “I really like when people feel like they know me, because I’m the same way with the celebrities I like. The ones I like the most are the ones that let me in, and you go, ‘Oh my god, I think that I could be friends with them,’ so if people think they know me, I’m like, ‘You probably do.’”

Part of that sharing herself is due to the fact that Glaser has been on several reality shows. She was on the 27^th season of Dancing with the Stars, along with Last Comic Standing, along with her own show on E!, but for FBoy Island, she’s now the host. For this role, she took what she’d learned as a participant and brought something special to her new role.

“I brought empathy, which I think a lot of people who are making these shows do not have for the people that are giving up their lives to be on it and giving up their privacy and giving up a lot of control,” states Glaser. “I felt fairly used and abused and discarded after I did Dancing with the Stars because that’s the nature of the show. They don’t really need you after you’re voted off and they don’t need to ever talk to you again or treat you like you ever existed. They kind of just claw machine you out of the dance hall and just jettison you across the country from wherever you came and don’t call again.”

It’s pretty abrupt, continues Glaser, to say nothing of the long hours and the invasive nature of reality programming, so she came to her hosting gig with the her goal being to not exploit these people.

“It’s to let them exploit themselves by empowering them and by celebrating how cool they are,” Glaser explains. “They took this chance that most people don’t, you know?”

Glaser also thinks that, being in the public eye, where people have a lot of opinions about her and have no issue whatsoever putting that out into the social media ether, she takes that into account, as well. As a watcher of reality television, herself, she has no desire to denigrate and debase the show’s f-boys.

“They’re going to go through the ringer when this stuff airs and they’re thinking that the whole time,” says Glaser. “So I always just like to remind them how proud I am of them and how brave they are and how 99.999% of people watching at home don’t have the balls to put themselves out there like they do.”

Glaser further explains that she finds reality show participants to be really brave because their true selves will come out, no matter how much they might trey to hide it on these shows. And, as much as people might think reality show people are morons or gluttons for punishment in the name of being famous and how shallow that might be, she thinks they actually have a lot more courage and self esteem than those of us who would never open ourselves up like that to cameras.

I bring up the point that, essentially, shows like FBoy Island or Last Comic Standing are essentially just game shows on a much bigger scale, and Glaser agrees.

“Game shows are reality because they’re normal people,” she concurs. “We like watching normal people compete and lose and win and cry and be sad and lose money and win money.”

With all of her work and appearances on TV, you have to wonder just how Glaser finds time to come up with new material for new specials or her current tour, or if it’s just that she’s doing things all the time which gives her on-stage fodder?

“I think that it is that I do stay really busy and I don’t ever stop,” confesses Glaser. “The pressure, I think, is mainly what keeps me creating. If someone asked me to do a special…I may not be ready for it, but I say yes because I know that the anxiety and the pressure of having to do that is going to make me create. Most of my ambition comes from pure anxiety and dread and saying yes to things that I’m terrified to do.”

Glaser offers that up as her advice for anyone who’s wanting to be more prolific: just to sign up for things that you’re not ready for because a deadline is, for her, the only thing that will get the comedian to act and to write. Additionally, she says, she’s just gotten more efficient of through the years of mining her life for material.

“When I’m in a conversation, I’m not as embarrassed as I might have been at another point to say, ‘Hold on one second–I have to write that down,’” Glaser cheerfully admits. “I know now through doing this long enough that you won’t remember the thing you just thought of later on. You have to stop the conversation and jot it down. That’s money on the line.”

Not even just money, says Glaser, but that’s an idea that she wants to put out into the world, and nine out of ten times, if she doesn’t write it down, it won’t come back and is just gone into the ether.

“I’ve become more efficient at the process, but also I just maintain this thing of just like always saying yes to things that I’m terrified of and then having to show up and be fantastic when I do it,” Glaser says of what she explains as “the pressure of not letting people down.”

Given that Nikki Glaser graduated from the University of Kansas and while there, lived on Daisy Hill in Oliver Hall, performing for friends and family at the Lied Center–right across the street from her former dorm–adds another layer of tension to the show she’s performing Sunday night.

“It’s really fun because there’s always people in the crowd that knew me when, and that always adds a layer of nervousness to it,” Glaser says. “That makes me try a bit harder to be amazing. You know, it’s, it’s easier to perform for strangers than it is for even one person who might be questioning if you’re as good as all these people think you are. Just having anyone in the crowd that’s kind of like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ is always just kind of a boon for me to pull out a better performance.”

While she always likes that, it’s also that Glaser is someone who’s really likes to celebrate where she came from and is very attached to things that have been a part of her life. She spent three years going to and living at KU–and that’s where it all began, she explains.

“I really associate college with that time of grittiness where I was just a literal nobody,” Glaser says. “Had never had a TV appearance and didn’t have a manager and just was an open mic-er.”

Glaser still relates to that person to this day, she continues, saying she still feels like that girl who knew that she was going to make it, had no question about it, and wasn’t scared at all about all the hurdles that she would have to cross throughout her career.

“I was still delusional about certain things and was really confident, but also very insecure,” Glaser admits. “I feel like I’m the same person that I was back then. I still am friends with all the same friends I had back then. I’m as dirty as I can be and as irreverent and edgy and all these words that, you know, kind of, I don’t absolutely love, but I understand why people describe them as me to describe them to me. I do feel like I’m pretty wholesome and Lawrence is a very near and dear place to my heart.”

Nikki Glaser performs at the Lied Center on Sunday, October 29. Details on that show here.