Nikki Glaser Explains Why She Wanted to Tackle Suicide in Her Emmy-Nominated Comedy Special: ‘Part of the Problem Is We Don’t Talk About It’

variety.com:

Anna Tingley It’s hard to make people laugh at the thought of wanting to kill yourself. For Nikki Glaser, though, jokes about suicide might be her funniest yet – to everyone but her mom, that is. “The joke that’s in the special about my mom saying, ‘People don’t want to hear you talking about blowing your head off’ is a true thing that she said,” Glaser tells Variety for Making A Scene, presented by HBO, recalling the conversation the two had while prepping material for her latest Emmy-nominated special titled, fittingly, “Someday You’ll Die.” “My mom’s biggest concern is not that her daughter is concerned with killing herself, but that her daughter is going to offend the audience by [talking about] killing herself,” she says.

For most, that would be a sad realization. For a comedian like Glaser, it’s fodder for laughs. “That was always just so funny to me.” Her jokes about suicide, which are smack-dab in the middle of the hour-long special (“I do have a plan,” she begins, “I always forget that I’m going to kill myself…duh!”) contain the ethos of much of Glaser’s most recent work, which is to talk about the taboo.

If there’s no cure for chronic depression, the next best thing is to let people know they’re not alone. “Our society has a problem.

And part of the problem is we don’t talk about it,” she says. “So people that do have suicidal thoughts don’t talk to anyone about it, and then they end up doing it because they feel so alone.” While unafraid to tackle darker subjects, Glaser repeats how people suffering from suicidal ideation should call the crisis hotline 988 and repeats the 988 hotline number several times throughout her special.