We all love a good laugh but unfortunately, not many people were laughing at the Golden Globes this year as host Jo Koy came out of seemingly nowhere to tell a bunch of bad jokes and cause outrage more than anything else.
One moment, in particular, has gone viral online after Koy told a joke about the Barbie movie that didn’t exactly go over too well with the cast (or anybody really). The joke compared Oppenheimer and Barbie, reducing the movie to being about “a plastic doll with big boobies.”
As he tells his joke the camera cuts to director, Greta Gerwig, as well as Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, none of whom are even close to cracking a genuine smile, some of them look like they’re outright cringing. It only gets worse as Koy continues to riff on the film, “the key moment in Barbie is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite and flat feet, or what casting directors call a character actor.” If you haven’t seen the clip, trust me when I say the silence after the punchline is deafening.
The problem with this joke lies primarily in the fact that it’s not funny, but aside from that, it belittles the work that the cast and crew put into the movie as well as outright body shaming the film’s star. The comedian has been at the receiving end of a lot of backlash online for what he said at the awards.
Whilst speaking to GMA3 the morning after he did acknowledge some of the shortcomings in his material, admitting that some of his jokes, particularly the Taylor Swift one, didn’t come out the way he intended.
“I was trying to make fun of the NFL using cutaways and how the Globes didn’t have to do that. So it was more of a jab towards the NFL […] it just didn’t come out that way.”
Whilst he does admit the Swift joke might have been a misstep, it wasn’t the only poorly received part of his monologue. He doesn’t specifically mention the Barbie joke in the interview so it’s hard to say whether he regrets it, however, he is self-critical of his performance, telling GMA hosts, “it was a tough gig!”
He also attributes the poor jokes to the lack of prep time he and his writers had as Koy only knew he had the gig 10 days before the awards ceremony was set to take place. He only had just over a week to write the entire monologue and whilst he did have help, usually the hosts are given a lot longer to prepare for such things.
Overall, Koy maintains that he is proud of what he did at the Golden Globes, “That’s one thing I want to be proud about you know? It was a long journey and the opportunity came […] I jumped on it.” Perhaps this can be a learning experience for him, who knows, maybe this will help Koy to become an even better comedian in the future, although he probably has a few more apologies to make first.