Nicole Bayer does it | entertainment

On a recent spring morning, Nicole Bayer finished working out with her personal trainer and calmed down her dog Clyde, who was “yelling at a ghost,” as she began to reflect on her busy schedule.

She’s juggling four podcasts, preparing for a table read for another production, and working on testing new stand-up material.

Bayer is now preparing for what could be one of the most pivotal moments of her career.

This year, she is nominated three times for the “Emmy” award. Baier is the first black woman to be nominated for Outstanding Host in a Reality Chef or Competition Program for her work on “Nailed It!” on Netflix, a baking competition where failing a famous pastry chef is the norm. She is also nominated for Outstanding Reality or Competition Program as an executive producer of the show, and nominated for Outstanding Writing at the Variety Special Emmy Award for her Netflix stand-up series Big Beautiful Weirdo.

“Give me an Emmy please,” she captioned a clip post on Instagram after learning of the nominations. (She was also nominated for two Emmys last year.)

Bayer, 35, called herself “this generation’s Bob Saget.” Her image in the helpful Netflix movie “Nailed It!” earned her enthusiastic young fans – some of whom shout the catchphrase when they spot her in public. But her comedic routines can be cheeky forays into her sexual exploits and observations about race, including her unexpected reason for enjoying sex with white men.

She is the Nicole Bayer of her generation—a dreamer raised in the suburbs of White, the daughter of an immigrant from Barbados and the Jim Crow South, and an entertainer who plans her success with the acumen of a business executive her mother and grandmother would have had. preferred that she was.

Along the way, Bayer says, she worked to break free from expectations of what a black woman should look and sound like. She said in an interview with NPR in 2019 that trying to fit into a mold that others expected was unsettling, and similar to that of Blackface.

“It sucks when you understand — Oh, Hollywood understands one type of black,” she told NPR. “Like, Emma Stone, Emma Roberts — all these girls can exist and they don’t have to be the same thing. They can be anyone. And we must be one.”

Bayer grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Middletown, New Jersey. She credits her mother, Lily Bayer, a Mississippi native, with spotting her comedic talents and directing her to the theater. This is where she discovered the power to make people laugh.

Despite encouraging her theater interests, Bayer says, her mother wanted her to follow a more traditional path after high school. After her mother’s death when Bayer was 16, she decided to move to New York to study acting. “I wouldn’t have been able to go if she hadn’t died,” Bayer said.

She survived in Manhattan by working odd jobs, eating cheap pizza and smoking marijuana with friends. She aspired to be an actress like Viola Davis, or someone with enough range to star in A Raisin in the Sun or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? how she learned her craft.

After her father died of a heart attack when she was 21, Bayer said she was looking for a way to deal with her grief when she stumbled upon improv and began to find support. She joined the Upright Citizens Brigade theater improv school and began performing.

Sometimes she didn’t like the humor on stage. Bayer and her best friend, Sashir Zamata, didn’t always understand the cultural references of majority-white improv groups. The confusion was often mutual.

“We would get it [stage] and references to things like the Black Church and R&B,” which would surprise some viewers, Zamata said.

After being repeatedly mistaken for each other, Bayer and Zamata began performing around New York City with another black comedian, Keisha Zolar, as an improv group called Doppelganger.

Bayer landed the MTV show Girl Code, where she and other comedians and actresses offered funny takes on the unwritten rules of female behavior and explored grooming rituals like waxing.

This was followed by offers to perform stand-up comedy at colleges and universities. Bayer was initially reluctant to take these jobs because she was unfamiliar with stand-up, but her manager convinced her to take a chance – and the money.

Her manager told her that her lack of knowledge about stand-up comedy and hesitation to try it was “like leaving money on the table,” she said. “My dad would be so mad.”

Baier said she’ll “crash” her college shows during the week and then “bomb” her comedy club in Los Angeles on the weekends.

MTV gave her the opportunity to create a scripted show. “Nicole Really Is” depicts her life as an unconventional-looking actress in her 20s trying to get roles in Hollywood while figuring out adulthood. In one episode, Bayer reenacted the audition in which casting director White instructed her to sound and act “Black” for the role, an experience Bayer carried with her from her early days in the entertainment industry.

“We are not a monolith. I say black because I am black,” she said. “I think when people say, ‘Be blacker, be edgier’ … I don’t know, I just want to make myself.”

Bayer’s show was praised for its diverse cast in a series that did not focus solely on the personalities of the characters. He was criticized for his inability to go beyond crude jokes and racial tropes for laughs.

MTV canceled the show after one season in 2016. Facebook Watch picked it up for a second season and did not renew it for a third.

“I’m very proud to have done a great comedy about a fat black girl,” she said. “I learned to be on set. I learned to be in the writer’s room.”

Criticism of Blackness no longer bothers her, Bayer said.

When comedian Faizon Love called her an “unfunny black woman” in an Instagram post last year, Bayer thanked him for sending people to see her now-Emmy-nominated Netflix special. “He doesn’t have a Netflix special that I can watch,” she said casually, adding that many would agree.

Instead, Bayer says, she’s focused on building an empire. Conan O’Brien’s company, Team Coco, is currently producing her dating podcast Why Don’t You Want to Date Me? She plays Nikki Coles, a real estate agent, on “Grand Crew,” an all-black NBC comedy series that depicts the daily lives of upper-middle-class people without an underlying black tragedy. Bayer also stars in the recently released Mack & Rita alongside Diane Keaton and Loretta Devine.

Bayer may not have the business degree her parents would have liked, but she has mastered the art of being herself.

“My parents would be really proud that I got it,” she said. “It would be nice if they were there to help, give wisdom or support. But mom would be really proud of me. She said, “Maybe these jokes aren’t for me, but they’re for someone else.”