After Nikki Glaser took a playful jab at Leonardo DiCaprio during the Golden Globes, the Oscar winner responded in a way she did not expect with a generous thank-you gift.
While appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Glaser explained that she always sends flowers to celebrities she roasts if they take the joke well. It is her way of acknowledging that being a good sport is part of what makes her comedy work, reports Entertainment Weekly.
But in this case, the tables turned. DiCaprio did not just laugh it off; he sent her three baskets of pasta in return, according to Page Six.
Does Leo want to smash?
Glaser leaned into the absurdity of the gift, joking that it made her wonder if DiCaprio was flirting. She quipped, "Does Leo want to smash?" before poking fun at his well-known dating history.
She joked that she is not his usual type, suggesting he tends to go for much younger women, adding that maybe she would have had a better shot if he had sent something more juvenile like Spaghetti O's or snacks like a crib full of Dunkaroos.
Pasta present was not random
The gift tied directly back to Glaser's Golden Globes monologue, where she teased the One Battle After Another nominee about both his career and his personal life. Before the show, she warned the 51-year-old DiCaprio she would be making a joke at his expense, and he took it in stride, as previously reported by the Toronto Sun.
During the ceremony, she delivered one of the night's most talked-about lines: praising his achievements, then joking that his most impressive feat was accomplishing it all before his girlfriend turned 30.
The joke landed and went viral
The joke tapped into a long-running public perception of DiCaprio's dating habits, something that, as Variety notes, has become one of the few widely known details about his private life, since he rarely shares personal information. His latest reported partner, model Vittoria Ceretti, is 27, according to the Toronto Sun.
Glaser later admitted the joke was cheap but said she did not have many other angles to work with. She said, "We do not have anything else about you," adding that she even dug up an old 1991 interview DiCaprio did with Teen Beat magazine to find material. That is where the pasta reference came from his stated love of pasta, pasta and more pasta, which she worked into her bit.
Attempted to avoid the obvious joke
On Fallon's show, she said she initially tried to avoid the obvious joke about his younger girlfriends because it has been done so often. She said, "That joke has been going on longer than his current girlfriend has been alive," per Page Six. But ultimately, she circled back to it because there simply was not much else to go on.
Glaser is now jokingly holding out for more luxury gifts, saying she is expecting a package from Hermes any day now, per Entertainment Weekly, after making another joke comparing Sean Penn to a high-end leather handbag.
