When Nikki Glaser hosted the Golden Globes last January, she pulled off something rare, winning over the room, the internet and the audience at home.

Her monologue landed sharp but warm, walking the line between roast and toast. She poked fun at Hollywood without leaving anyone visibly wounded. Critics praised the balance. Celebrities laughed. And within days, Glaser, who made history as the first solo female host, emerged with something that few earn on their first try: an invitation back.

Now preparing for a return to the Globes, which will air live on Sunday on CBS, Glaser admits her initial instinct was to push things further.

“I think I struck a really good balance between great jokes that were a little roasty and familiarizing people with my style, but also taking the edge off and celebrating them more,” she tells Yahoo. “Going into this time, I thought, Oh, now I’m licensed to go a little harder because the celebrities in the room kind of know who I am. They know what I’m about. They know the temperature of my comedy.”

Then she took another look at the nominees and A-listers she’d be addressing.

“So I was writing a little bit harder and then I realized: Julia Roberts wasn’t there last year. George Clooney wasn’t there last year. Leo [DiCaprio] wasn’t there last year,” Glaser says. “They might not be familiar with what I do.”

Glaser decided to take the material she’s working with out for a test drive.

In the weeks leading up to the Globes, Glaser has been bouncing around Hollywood, dropping into different stand-up clubs and trying jokes in front of real audiences. Again and again, she found herself running into the same invisible wall, as there is one person audiences simply refused to let her touch: Julia Roberts.

“No one wants you to make fun of America’s sweetheart. Not even the lightest, most innocent joke,” Glaser says of Roberts, nominated this year for After the Hunt. “She is the most sacred of cows in America. I assumed that we want to protect her at all costs, but it’s as if I was joking about JonBenét [Ramsey]. [Audiences] were like, ‘This is not funny. We’re not going to laugh about it.’”

That reaction has made navigating Roberts’s presence especially tricky. “You’ve got to mention her, and I can’t just fawn over her — that’s not fun,” Glaser says. “So what I do with her will be like walking a tightrope. It’s going to be like the hardest joke that I’ve ever written.”

That calculation — knowing when a joke crosses from sharp to uncomfortable — is once again at the center of Glaser’s approach, guiding not just who she jokes about, but how and if those jokes belong in a room filled with the most powerful people in entertainment.

“I just try to write the funniest jokes possible and then imagine saying them to that person,” Glaser says. “If it’s not going to feel comfortable, I don’t need to do it. I love a good joke, but we just have to find a better joke.”

This year’s nominee list is stacked with stars, including One Battle After Another’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. And while both names loom large, they provoke very different reactions from Glaser.

Penn, she says, sparked a mix of fear and curiosity: “He is someone that I’m terrified of doing jokes about, but I also think that he might be in on it.”

As she is writing and trying out material, Glaser says she pictures Penn — who once scolded Chris Rock for an Oscars joke about Jude Law — not laughing.

“He’s one person that if he doesn’t give me what I want in terms of like a giggle or like a little chuckle or just a little shift in a seat — if he just, like, stares me down, steely-eyed, that’s funny,” she says. “And that’s almost expected.”

DiCaprio, on the other hand, is untouchable in a different way.

“I grew up being in love with Leo,” Glaser says. “He was a huge part of my sexual awakening as a young girl. I just feel like, for me, he’s kind of off-limits in that I can’t even talk to him or look at him. How am I supposed to say his name in front of him?”

There’s still disbelief in her voice. “It doesn’t seem right that this person is going to sit and listen to me talk.”

Watching DiCaprio laugh along with Chelsea Handler’s jokes at the Critics Choice Awards helped put Glaser at ease. She’d worried about overlap — “there’s only so many jokes you can make about certain celebrities,” she says — but Handler went in a different direction.

“She was hitting on Benicio Del Toro. I’m going to hit on Jacob Elordi,” Glaser says.

Glaser is keenly aware that balance matters most when the joke target is also a pop-culture obsession. Take Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner, whose PDA-filled awards season tour has officially kicked off.

“There seems to be so much fodder there,” Glaser says. “I haven’t written a joke yet — we’re still five days out — but that moment between them at the Critics Choice Awards was so sweet.”

Glaser is referring to the Marty Supreme star publicly thanking Jenner onstage — a moment that felt like a turning point for the couple of three years. She loved it, for the record, and hopes it shifted the narrative for skeptics.

“Anyone who maybe rolled their eyes at their relationship is kind of on board now more than ever,” she says.

But that warmth has complicated things. Glaser admits she now realizes she had a “blind spot” when it came to the pair — and especially Jenner. “I know her from The Kardashians and I feel like she’s my friend,” Glaser says. “I don’t want to go hard on her.”

She catches herself laughing. “Now I have a new challenge.”

Moments like these have Glaser rethinking her own boundaries as a host.

“Sometimes I don’t like going after plus-ones,” she explains. “They’re not the ones being nominated. They didn’t ask for this.”

As Glaser continues refining her monologue, she’s acutely aware that awards show comedy exists inside a shifting cultural landscape — one shaped by exhaustion, scrutiny and evolving norms.

Politics, Glaser says, is still fair game as long as it’s handled delicately.

“Lightly touching on it, not being too heavy-handed, but just giving a little wink and a nod,” she says. “I like when I watch these monologues back from past award shows and I can see where they were in time and maybe what the zeitgeist was talking about.”

The goal isn’t to weigh the night down, she adds, but to acknowledge the moment. “The state of the world right now — it’s insane,” Glaser says. “And this night is like a huge escape from that.”

Still, she allows herself room for a subtle jab. “You can’t help but just do a little dig here and there and maybe make people question where you even stand.”

Plastic surgery, once an easy punch line, has become more complicated.

“[Comedians] used to make fun of [celebrities] for doing it and judge them,” she says. “And now it’s become so ubiquitous, and it’s almost become body shaming to make fun of people modifying their bodies.”

If she touches the topic at all, it has to be from a place of inclusion. “I would be like — I’m participating in it too,” she says. “Like, sign me up. So anything you all have done, I have done too.”

What she’s careful to avoid is the wrong kind of laughter. “When I have done jokes about celebrities [and] plastic surgery to audiences that aren’t celebrities, people just feel almost venomous about it,” Glaser says. “I don’t like the laughter that’s coming from a mean place.”

That same instinct informs her self-imposed “off-limits” list. Nepo baby jokes feel tired. She has no interest in anything Jada Pinkett Smith, as Chris Rock learned the hard way, or Nicki Minaj’s “association with the right-wingers.” Anything that’s simply depressing gets cut.

“I always run it through: Would this ruin their night?” Glaser says.

It’s a question that has guided her process before. Last year, she even reached out to Benny Blanco ahead of a joke in a rare moment of consent checking that underscored how seriously she takes the responsibility of that stage. She knows the answer can be yes, because she’s lived it.

“I’ve been roasted before and laughed — and then cried in the bathroom later,” she says. “I want everyone to have a great evening.”

That ethos — sharp but humane, fearless but thoughtful — is what defined Glaser’s first turn as Golden Globes host. And while she may be ready to go a little harder this year, she’s still walking the same tightrope. What that means for Julia Roberts, though, remains to be seen.

Watch the Golden Globes live Sunday, Jan. 11, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS. It’s also streaming on Paramount+ and here on Yahoo.com.