Jo Koy has been widely panned for his performance as host at the 81st Golden Globe Awards yesterday. What went wrong? Photo / Getty Images
OPINION
Awkward silences, boos and a fuming Taylor Swift greeted Jo Koy’s first hosting gig at the Golden Globes last night. What went wrong?
Depending on what you choose to include (the Crunchyroll Anime Awards don’t tend to get much coverage), there are a dozen or so high-profile ceremonies comprising the annual Hollywood awards season, but it’s the Golden Globes that offers its host the greatest opportunity to dominate the headlines the next day.
And you cannot in all good conscience claim that Jo Koy, the Filipino-American comedian penanced with hosting this year’s Globes, wasn’t the most memorable feature of yesterday’s ceremony. Just look at the write-ups:
“Host Jo Koy’s jokes fall flat and six other Golden Globes moments,” wrote the BBC. “The joke’s on Jo Koy: Golden Globes host delivers a bad gig for the ages,” reckoned the Guardian. “Golden Globes Host Jo Koy Booed During Monologue, Blames His Writers,” deadpanned Rolling Stone.
Page after page of savagery – far more attention than received by the winners themselves. At least Vanity Fair had the grace to keep Koy’s name out of the headline. “The 2024 Golden Globes Were a Near-Total Disaster,” it wrote, fairly. Ah, the standfirst: “And not just because of Jo Koy.”
It would be easy to have sympathy for Koy, a 52-year-old veteran stand-up best known for regular appearances on E!’s Chelsea Handler-hosted chat show Chelsea Lately, if he hadn’t been quite so remarkably unlikable even in his failure.
Met with painful silence or disbelieving groans, Koy decided to lash out at an audience of his peers, blame his own writing staff, and generally did all he could to make the situation worse. Before this weekend, few had heard of him outside of a sliver of US late-night comedy fans. Now he’ll forever be remembered as “that guy who bombed horribly at the Globes in 2024, sentenced himself to death by Swifties, then went away again. Probably permanently.”
But as Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and even last year’s presenter, Jerrod Carmichael, have shown, it didn’t need to be like this. It’s perfectly possible to host the Golden Globes, be funny and mean about everybody in the room, and come out with your reputation burnished.
Here are the Dos and Don’ts of the gig. Who knows, it may prove useful if anybody has the unique combination of misplaced confidence, catastrophic folly and career desperation to take the job next year. Russell Brand’s probably free.
It’s a rule any public speaking coach will tell you: no matter what the truth of the matter is, the audience does not need to hear that you only started writing your speech last week / on the bus / in the toilet 10 minutes ago / that you’re winging it. There is no point in showing the working. They will not laugh encouragingly if you let them know you couldn’t be bothered to start until the last minute.
By the standards of most Hollywood awards shows, Koy was a last-minute booking. Everybody you could think of – or at least everybody the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) could think of – was asked first and turned it down, including Chris Rock. After the HFPA’s controversies in recent years, as well as the lack of preparation time afforded by the recent end to the writers’ strike, it was rightly deemed a poisoned chalice.
But Jo Koy drank up. And when it tasted bad, namely in the form of hundreds of industry professionals failing to laugh at his joke about Barbie’s “big boobs”, he decided it was not, in fact, his fault, but the fault of everybody else – including the team of professional writers who helped him. “I got the gig 10 days ago!” he shouted into the void. “You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down. I wrote some of these, and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
All class. Saturday Night Live, mediocre though it so often is, manages to produce an hour of original sketch comedy and a host’s monologue every week. The writers for US late-night hosts deliver a clutch of topical zingers every day. There are people on Twitter who come up with brilliant material every few minutes. So a lack of notice is not the watertight defence Koy, a professional stand-up for 30 years, thinks it is.
Ricky Gervais has made a personal brand of aggressive apathy. “You can’t say anything nowadays … So watch me say it … *sunglasses emoji*” could summarise any of his standup specials for the last decade. It’s a shtick that’s become less and less funny, but worked well when he had the singular task of making a room full of Hollywood A-listers uncomfortable.
“I’ve got to be the bloke sitting at home who shouldn’t have been invited,” he once said of the job, which he took four times. Gervais is as establishment as anybody these days, but with his Reading accent, performative lager sips and uh-oh-what-am-I-gonna-say-next shrugs, he made the show a must-watch.
“I’d like to quash this ridiculous rumour going around that the only reason The Tourist was nominated was so the Hollywood Foreign Press could hang out with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. That is rubbish. That is not the only reason. They also accepted bribes,” was a typical gag in 2011.
Five years later, he introduced the disgraced Mel Gibson by saying he wanted to find something nice to say about him. “So: I’d rather have a drink with him in his hotel room tonight than with Bill Cosby.”
In 2020, one joke about Judi Dench in Cats even forced him to hesitate. “It was the role she was born to play, because she loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her own …” The TV broadcast was bleeped for the extra word.
“I don’t care anymore. I never did,” Gervais said that night. And it was believable. On Sunday he won for Best Stand-Up Comedy on Television. He didn’t physically appear, but his ghost loomed large, sneering.
What’s the old line, “If you come at the king, you’d best not miss”? Something like that. Well Koy came for Taylor Swift and didn’t exactly miss, he just lightly prodded a hornet’s nest.
“The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift,” he said, referencing her appearances at boyfriend Travis Kelce’s matches. The room sighed. Swift took a damning sip of champagne.
It’s probably best if Koy is put in witness protection now. He is not safe from the Swifties. He swung for the Queen and it was … not very funny. Swift deserves a takedown, being the most powerful entertainer on the planet; and there are plenty of things she can be criticised for, but Koy’s joke was a waste of the opportunity.
Certainly, it wasn’t worth Koy risking his life against the Swiftie army, who will likely now tear him limb from limb, or picket his gigs, or firebomb his pets, or make his very worst nightmare come true: ensure he has to host the Golden Globes every year for the rest of his life.
The champagne sip was probably a signal. Expect Swift’s next album to include a track called “Joke, Oi” about a clown who mocks a famous woman, so she murders him in the woods. It could be about anyone!
Nobody needed to hear how grateful Koy was to have the opportunity to host, even if it was true. The HFPA is not more likely to rehire a host if they are complimentary, only if they go down well. And it’s an association so riven with issues – especially a historic lack of diversity – that it’s safe quarry: everybody loves it when the bosses are slagged off.
“Many talented people of colour were snubbed in major categories. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that because the Hollywood Foreign Press are all very, very racist,” Gervais said in 2020.
Last year, the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, who’s known for his cool, laid-back style and subversive storytelling, was similarly direct about the elephant in the room. “I’m here because I’m black,” Carmichael announced, to uneasy laughter. He did it for the money, he said, straight-faced, before joking: “One minute you’re making mint tea at home, the next minute you’re invited to be the black face of an embattled organisation. Life comes at you pretty fast, you know?”
“When I was a kid growing up, I used to watch the show, and I would stay up late with my family just trying to guess who would win and every time my mom would say, ‘It’s Meryl Streep, stupid! Who else is going to win? She wins every time.’ And she was right. You do, you win all the time. That’s why when the Golden Globes called me and asked me if I wanted to host, I jumped at the chance and I said yes.”
So went the staggeringly dreary opening beats of Koy’s monologue on Sunday. A gag about Meryl Streep winning lots of awards in 2024? It was more up-to-date than a later mention of Hall & Oates, but aside from a lifetime achievement award in 2017, Streep hasn’t won a Golden Globe in well over a decade. Nor an Oscar, nor a Bafta, nor a Screen Actor’s Guild award.
If you’re mining a desperate seam like “Meryl Streep is successful”, at least make it original, like Amy Poehler’s line in 2013: “Meryl Streep is not here tonight. She has the flu – but I hear she’s amazing in it.”
The general rule about slinging arrows from the pulpit is: if it’s truly funny, you’ll get away with it. Tina Fey described Gravity as “the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age”. Amy Poehler managed to get away with a joke about 12 Years a Slave by saying “I loved 12 Years a Slave, and I can honestly say that after seeing that film, I will never look at slavery the same way again.”
But their zenith came with this, from Poehler: “Kathryn Bigelow is nominated tonight. I haven’t really been following the controversy over Zero Dark Thirty, but when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.” Harsh, but so funny that even Cameron probably laughed. (He didn’t.)
The same cannot be said of Koy’s efforts. Saying that Harry and Meghan “get paid millions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing … That’s just by Netflix” is appallingly bad given they are the most easily-mocked individuals on the planet. And comparing Barry Keoghan’s penis to Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose in Maestro felt offensive to everybody involved, but mainly the audience, who could have done with a punchline.
Gervais once boiled down the whole to-do and served it back to the A-listers. “If you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f*** off,” he told the assembled. He was right. But the same could be said of the host: come up, tell some jokes, then clear off. It shouldn’t look so difficult.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only