Jo Koy’s Golden Globes monologue was disastrous. The comedian has tried to make every excuse for why his boring, lowbrow comedy was not well received, but he needs to accept that it is his own fault he flopped.
Koy was left floundering after several jokes garnered sour reactions from the talent in attendance. Viewers later called his remarks sexist for undermining the accomplishments women made this year.
A few minutes in, Koy got frustrated, remarking “I got the gig 10 days ago, you want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up!”
The comedian went on to blame his writers. “I wrote some of these and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
To be fair, Koy did receive the call asking him to host only 10 days before the ceremony, and only got to meet his writers in-person two days prior. However, the comic has since doubled down and tried to blame his audience in Hollywood for his poor performance.
In his first standup set since the show, he told a supportive St. Louis crowd his Globes audience was “soft,” and he “just come[s] from a different time.”
Koy appears to echo the sentiments of other comedians who are frustrated with today’s “woke culture.” In an interview with the LA Times, Koy asks, “Can we f***ing laugh at ourselves?”
Hollywood has been able to laugh at itself though, and other hosts this award season have done an excellent job at riling up their crowds.
Instead of passing the blame onto the audience at the Globes, Koy should spend some time taking notes from comedians who had much more successful monologues.
John Mulaney hosted the Governor’s Awards and started off with a self-deprecating joke about his alcoholism, and how most people probably do not know who he is.
He said, “For those of you who don’t recognize me from the Tuesday night AA meeting in the Palisades … If you don’t know who I am that’s totally fine. I am like Louis Farrakhan. I mean a lot to a very small group of people.”
This joke makes him seem much humbler, and the crowd becomes more receptive to his quips throughout the monologue.
Koy is not able to do this very well, and his opening comes off as very self-aggrandizing as he talks about how amazing it is to be the host of the Golden Globes. He does not have the same relatability Mulaney conveys.
Chelsea Handler is another comedian who hosted an award show this year, and her audience at the Critic’s Choice Awards seemed to love her performance.
Handler’s style of comedy is like Koy’s. She makes a lot of jokes that can be seen as crude and impolite, like when she describes her sexual attraction to older men in Hollywood.
However, there is something fundamentally different about a female comic like Handler making these jokes.
Koy’s jokes diminishing Barbie to a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies,” is steeped in a history of men undermining women’s accomplishments and reducing them to sexual objects.
He is punching down at women who are working so hard to be acknowledged for their accomplishments, but Handler is humorously giving men a taste of their own medicine.
Apart from the total lack of social awareness displayed by his humor, the biggest thing holding him back was that the jokes were just not funny.
The bulk of Koy’s monologue was not hard to watch because it was so offensive, I was cringing because the jokes were so lazy and unoriginal.
Even with the short turnaround, I find it disappointing such an experienced comedian could not come up with better material for the opportunity of his life.
Koy failed at the Golden Globes, and he needs to own it. Furthermore, other comedians need to recognize the reasons why Koy failed, and that society has not become more sensitive to comedy, we simply demand better performances than the one Jo Koy tried to give us.
This story was written by Joseph Schamber. He can be reached at [email protected].
