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Comedian Nikki Glaser was unmasked during The Masked Singer semi-finals on November 24. After facing off against the Lambs, Nikki’s identity was revealed. While still in the Snowstorm costume, Nikki got emotional talking about her dear friend Bob Saget, who was the Squiggly Monster on the show. She spoke EXCLUSIVELY with HollywoodLife about honoring her late pal by going on the show.
“It was awesome because I just want to keep his memory alive,” Nikki said. “It’ll be a year in January since he passed, and I think everyone when he died kind of realized the impact he had on different people that you would have never known even knew him and how special he was. But I’m not someone who gets overly emotional about things like that, especially not on TV. I just really felt him in the room that night.”
Nikki revealed that the “last conversation” she had with Bob before his death in January 2022 was about The Masked Singer. “I knew how much he loved it. I kind of talked to him in my head backstage and was just like, ‘Bob, I’m doing it. This is so silly. Wish me luck. Let’s just have fun.’ I just felt like he was there and just helped me get through it,” she told HollywoodLife.
She added, “We should all be so lucky to have people talking about us the way people talk about Bob posthumously. He was so special. Any chance I get I bring up Bob. It was awesome that The Masked Singer already was very familiar with him and had the same fondness for him. All the judges, Nick [Cannon], all the producers, everyone loved Bob, so it was really nice to bring him into the room at night.”
The comedian showed off her vocal chops during her run on The Masked Singer. Nikki comes from a musical family and “always wanted to be a singer. But in high school, I had a voice coach that took my mom aside and said, ‘This girl does not have to have a career doing this. It’s a waste of your money, so I quit taking voice lessons.’”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started playing guitar and singing again. She also wrote comedy songs in order to intertwine her love for comedy and music. After signing on to do The Masked Singer, she got back into vocal training. “I worked with a vocal coach Amy Chapman on the show, and she just really helped me learn how to use my voice in a short amount of time in ways that were present to me,” Nikki noted.
The FBOY Island host continued, “In working with Amy, she’s so astute and so observant that she noticed that my voice was just not doing what I thought I could possibly do. She was like, ‘I feel like you have damage on your vocal cords.’ I had already known that I had because I talk for a living and do podcasts. I’ve been talking for 20 years nonstop. I went to a doctor during my time on the show because I was having inflammation issues just from singing things so much and talking all the time.”
Nikki ended up having vocal cord surgery after performing on the show with “damaged cords.” She added, “I had to be on three weeks of total vocal rest. No talking for three weeks, which was quite a struggle for me, but I would have never done that had it not been for the show.”
In light of her run on the show, Nikki now wants to “pursue singing as a career. It might take me a few years to really get good at it because it’s not going to be overnight. I do have a fan base. I would probably buy an album if I put it out, but I know that it’s a talent that takes a really long time to hone.” The Masked Singer finale will air November 30 on FOX.
