Nikki Glaser Roasts KPop Demon Hunters — “Boat Show in Boise”

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America’s reigning queen of the roast took the mic at Lincoln Center on April 23 and sent up the most unstoppable cultural phenomenon on earth — the HUNTR/X girls and their Grammy-winning “Golden.”

By TRH Entertainment Desk

April 25, 2026 — Nikki Glaser was handed the keys to the most star-studded room of the year, and she did exactly what she always does: found the sharpest possible joke and delivered it without flinching.

Hosting the 2026 Time100 Gala at Lincoln Center on Thursday evening — a ceremony celebrating Time magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 Most Influential People — Glaser opened with a quip that perfectly skewered both the event’s prestige and the year’s biggest cultural juggernaut. “This event is unique for more than just the scope of its honourees,” she told the audience. “It’s also the only ceremony of the year where the girls from KPop Demon Hunters aren’t singing ‘Golden.’ We tried to book them, but they’re headlining a boat show in Boise.”

The line landed, as Glaser’s lines tend to do — because the joke only works if “Golden” is genuinely, inescapably everywhere. And it is.

When Netflix released KPop Demon Hunters on June 20, 2025, few expected it to become a global phenomenon. But in just months, the film amassed over 236 million views, making it the streaming platform’s most-watched movie of all time. The animated musical follows HUNTR/X, a fictional K-pop girl group who perform sold-out concerts by day and use their secret identities as demon hunters to protect fans from a supernatural threat by night.

The film went on to win two Oscars — Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song — while “Golden” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for an eighth non-consecutive week and made history as the first K-pop song to win a Grammy Award. A sequel has since been confirmed, with directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans returning. Glaser’s “boat show in Boise” jab is, paradoxically, the highest possible compliment: you only mock what’s inescapable.

The Host: Nikki Glaser, Everywhere at Once

Glaser hosted the Time100 Gala as both emcee and honouree — herself named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2026 list, alongside Dakota Johnson, Zoe Saldaña, Luke Combs, Coco Jones, Kate Hudson, and Jennie.

She has been on a remarkable ascent: after going viral at the Netflix roast of Tom Brady in May 2024, Glaser made history in January 2025 as the first solo woman to host the Golden Globes, then hosted them again in 2026. She said ahead of Thursday’s event that she was looking forward to the Time100 Gala because of its lower “stakes” — “It’s not live, it’ll be a little bit looser, a different kind of approach.” The result, at least in the room, was exactly that: sharp, warm, and perfectly calibrated.

For the HUNTR/X girls, a boat show in Boise might just be their next album title.

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