The best week of comedian Nikki Glaser’s career – with her headline-grabbing appearance on Tom Brady’s Roast and the subsequent release of her new stand-up special – was not without unexpected surprises.

“Falling down on the couch after that performance was probably the best feeling I’ll ever have in my life,” Glaser told IndieWire about Netflix’s live joke festival with Brady. “The relief of doing that live when you’re on your period and Thought it was over, but it started again right before you went on stage. And there were no tampons at the Kia Forum, so you had to use a folded napkin and make yourself a pad that was only attached to the thong by a tiny strip of spandex that could fall out at any moment. There were so many things that could have gone wrong in that moment live on TV!”

Thankfully, no unexpected body surprise deterred a woman who has been performing in clubs around the world for 20 years. And after her mind-blowing performance – “You know (Tom’s) diet program? It’s so strict. But if you stick to it like he does, you could lose your family,” she joked – host Kevin Hart pointed out to her and the audience that she deserved a standing ovation.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever experience a moment like that again in my career, and I’m totally fine if I don’t, because I felt it once and that was enough,” she said.

But the internet was hungry for more. As luck would have it (“I was not Taylor Swift’s mastermind,” joked the longtime Swiftie), her new stand-up special, “Someday You’ll Die,” was about to air on HBO, where it received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) and has reached over 3 million viewers since its premiere in May.

This hour expresses her confusion over a topic familiar to any thirty-something circle of friends: the decision of whether or not to have children. Glaser doesn’t want any, most of her good friends do, and she sets out to find out why. The decision, always difficult, became even more heated this summer after the special aired, with online discussion dominated by Childless Cat Ladies and JD Vance. Another moment of good timing for Glaser, as women across the country were talking more about this very personal decision.

“I never thought, ‘What’s funny? What will people like?’ It was really, ‘What bothers me?'” she said of putting together the special. “I can’t imagine wanting (a baby). I can’t relate to it. at all. It just felt like a huge gap between all my friends who I usually have very similar feelings with. (The group chat) was all about fertility and having children. And I never expected this change.”

In “Someday You’ll Die,” she muses that there’s something wrong with her because she doesn’t want a baby. “Even as a kid, I would get dolls for Christmas and I’d think, ‘Oh God, that seems like a lot of work.’ … I’d try to leave them in front of my brother’s toy fire station,” she jokes in the special.

It would be easy to chalk this up to cool-girl posturing, but Glaser is serious about the tension at the core of her personal comedy. “I hate that I’m not like other girls, and I really want to just be a normal girl, and I’m just notand this is a quest to find out what’s wrong with me,” she said. “I haven’t really found the answers, but I’ve found a way to make fun of the things that I am.”

It’s a revealing project for the comedian, who regularly performs on tours and roast shows and also hosts reality shows such as “FBoy Island” as a celebrity presenter. It also comes at a time when truth in comedy is being examined. Comedy fans want to laugh, yes, but many also demand rigorous honesty. And many Also need comedians who parrot their own individual beliefs. Glaser has been in the business for a long time – what does she think about truth in stand-up? Does everything else matter if the punch lines hit home?

“I’m not a politician, I don’t legislate. My job is to be honest with myself,” she said. “And what’s authentic for me is sharing these dark thoughts that I have; that really frees me from shame. I struggle with the morality that’s imposed on comedians to say the right thing and have the right attitude. We have influence, of course, but we also tell jokes! … (It’s hard) because the things I think are so wrong and so bad, and there’s this fear of being canceled for saying the wrong thing. But ultimately, I know I’m a good person. I’ve often grappled with questions like, ‘Am I a bad person because of these thoughts?’ And I’m really not. I can sleep well at night knowing that I really didn’t say them to hurt anyone. … I’m only as sick as my secrets, so I just try to get as many secrets out as I can.”

Those secrets include suicidal thoughts and depression. In “Someday You’ll Die,” she reflects that it might be easier to just end it all. “Guns are easier to find than compassion,” she quips. (Glaser calls Lifeline 988 throughout the special.) It’s a provocative subject, and it took her a while to get to a point where the audience felt comfortable laughing with her.

“It becomes a challenge,” Glaser said of the exhilarating thrill of getting audiences to laugh at something taboo, whether it’s hoping a friend will miscarry so they can still spend time together or figuring out the easiest way for her to kill herself. “I got a lot of pushback from the audience on the suicide stuff, and I thought, ‘Oh, I guess I tilt really go there and talk about my suicidal thoughts and joke about how I’m probably going to kill myself one day.’ They’re never going to be OK with that. But I just kept going and kept trying until I found a way that actually worked. And it was one of the biggest laughs of my entire performance. That was really gratifying.”

Watching her crack punchlines about everything from her mother’s biggest worries to her potential death to (classic Glaser) fake gang bangs she reenacts with her boyfriend, it’s clear that she has no shortage of “dark thoughts” to live out. Which just means that hopefully she’ll be on stage for a very long time.

Apologies to Tom Brady.

“Someday You’ll Die” is now streaming on Max.