2024 Golden Globes host Jo Coy Photo: Reuters
In the days leading up to the Golden Globes, comedian Joe Koy sometimes wondered aloud why the film industry had ignored him. “Hollywood just didn’t bite,” he complained in 2022. “I am an arena artist. I'm on the list of people who aren't comics and sell out arenas. It's like Elton John, Billy Joel, Joe Koy and Coldplay. Like, what don’t you guys see?”
Hollywood saw a lot of Koy last week. His hosting of the Golden Globe Awards has gone down in history as one of the biggest disasters in awards show history, somewhere between a hellish stand-up concert and the Titanic hitting an iceberg. Jokes about Barbie's plastic protrusions, ridicule of Taylor Swift and a segment in which Coy compared Bradley Cooper's prosthetic nose to Barry Keoghan's non-prosthetic penis were met with icy silence at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
But when the curtain fell, his problems began in earnest. Angry Swifties attacked 52-year-old Coy. Everyone else wondered about the wisdom of sexist jokes about Barbie, a blockbuster that cleverly twists everyday misogyny. To say Coy's performance was disastrous is like saying Oppenheimer was vaguely talkative.
“It’s a tough room,” Coy admitted the next day. “It was hard work, I'm not going to lie… I'd be lying if [I said] it didn't hurt.”
On some level, you have to sympathize with Coy, whose career may never recover. With a slew of top comedians rumored to have pulled out of the show, he was approached just two and a half weeks ago to host the Globes and had nine days to write the opening monologue. However, the only group that didn't seem surprised that he trashed were those who had prior knowledge of his comedy.
They'll tell you that humor is Coy's thing. If Hollywood has been cold-blooded so far, there may be good reasons for it. Look what happened when he started paying attention to him.
Coy is in many ways a self-made comedy star. He was born Joseph Glenn Herbert to a U.S. Air Force father and a Filipino mother, and grew up primarily in Las Vegas. His stage name comes from a childhood nickname given to him by his Filipino aunt. This Asian heritage was the cornerstone of his comedy when he began his stand-up career in the early 1990s.
He was not welcomed with open arms. Having trouble breaking into the Vegas comedy scene, he took matters into his own hands by renting a local theater and going door to door selling tickets.
The tedious work paid off. He soon became a regular on the American equivalent of panel shows, appearing on VH1's Why I Love the '70s and Chelsea Handler's Chelsea Lately (she and Handler briefly became romantically involved).
But even as his career took off, Coy continued to consider himself an outsider. In 2016, he approached Netflix about making a comedy special. They fought him back. He went ahead anyway, booking the 1,800-seat Moore Theater in Seattle and shooting sets there. He then returned to Netflix with the finished film, which the streamer released as Jo Koy: Live from Seattle. Viewed today, the 62-minute film seems like an ominous portent of the Golden Globes. Coy is very excited, there is a vague sense of despair in him. The jokes are less than funny. You can sit quietly for an hour with a funny bone.
Taylor Swift, who is not amused by Jo Koy, is truly just like us! #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/1g6QG0Fbzz
— Nicole (@nikowl) January 8, 2024
“You go to an Indian reservation, I never see Indians,” he says early in the evening. “It’s just that all the Chinese… give me one Indian. I want to see Pocahontas. It's terrible, but he's just getting started. “When women laugh, they laugh hard, they don’t care,” another program begins. “Women will laugh and cry because they are emotional beings.” Finally, he turns to his Asian heritage. “I'm half white, half Filipino.. woohoo!.. Do you know how much a comedian is paid in the Philippines… chicken and flip flops!”
Whatever the straight-faced Golden says Viewers around the world, crowd in Seattle enjoys its raisins. As does one famous Hollywood figure.
“Steven Spielberg said, 'I'm a fan and I love this special thing, so let's work together.' And I didn’t care about anyone else in the industry,” Coy told the Hollywood Reporter. “If anyone else didn't get it, I'd say, 'I don't know if you know this, but Mr. Spielberg got it, so you all need to catch up.'
Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment has worked with Coy on Easter Sunday, his 2022 autobiographical comedy in which Coy plays a struggling stand-up who returns to his “loud and dysfunctional” Filipino family for Easter. The reviews were almost as scathing as Coy's Golden Globes spot. Indiewire criticized the script for being “universally lazy,” “hopelessly flat,” and “tasteless,” and the Hollywood Reporter shrugged. Meanwhile, one member of the r/Filipino subreddit called the film “an embarrassment to the community.”
After the Golden Globes, some came to Koy's defense. “These concerts are brutal,” said Whoopi Goldberg, although she admitted she didn't watch the Globes. “If you don't know the room, if you haven't been in these rooms before and you're pushed there, it's an accident.”
Coy—and maybe Steven Spielberg aside—the whole world would agree that the hotel The Beverly Hilton comic was more of a failure than a success. He'll no doubt want to prove that he can still split an audience that doesn't consist of Hollywood influencers and Taylor Swift. But a brief look at his career raises a question that Golden Globes organizers should have asked from the start. Was Joe Koy really that funny?
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