Nikki Glaser these days

It's getting too dense and mathematical. It used to feel like "she's finding comic gold in every moment" but now it's like "she's forcing comic alchemy in every moment, let me breathe for a sec." The jokes are still good, but it's too dense and calculated as to feel forced. Every other word is a punchline. I think that needs to happen sometimes, but it needs to be balanced with longer setups. If your standup is all about quick punchlines, you need a relaxed delivery with pauses like Hedberg, Wright, Jeselnik. Glaser is anxiously punching us with line after line, good lines, but it's tiring, partly because we feel she must be getting tired of all of this anxious punching. Also the value of an unexpected punchline is not just the quality of the line but the fact that it was unexpected, and Glaser's style forces us to expect big punches every other word. She's not shocking anymore. Her good lines need to be great, or she needs to stop conditioning us to expect such frequent bait-and-switches.

Every joke is a self-referencing web of subjokes, all happening too quickly and consistently to surprise us anymore. But I still think she's a legend.