Posted in: CBS, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: golden globes awards, Jo Koy, standup comedy, taylor swift

Sure, Jo Koy Wasn't Funny – But The Golden Globes Was The Real Joke

Jo Koy suffered what every standup comedian dreads when hosting an awards show, but it's really the Golden Globes that's the big joke.

Standup comedian Jo Koy ended up with his own small-scale tragedy this week when he hosted the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday. He committed the worst thing a comedian could do: fail to be funny. His jokes bombed. The audience of Hollywood A-Listers didn't like it, and in a panic, he blamed his writers for not being able to come up with good jokes (but has since apologised). All human drama was there in those hours for anyone who endured sitting through the awards. Millions of people watched Jo Koy endure humiliation and failure, not able to escape the stage because his job was to host the show.

In the week that followed, the community of standup comedians stepped up to defend him. Jo Koy, as a Hollywood standup, is part of a fiercely tight-knit tribe that knows how hard it is to be funny, let alone while hosting an award show that had guidelines on what he could or couldn't mention. Perhaps standup comedians shouldn't take the job after all – but as an entertainer, Koy has a family to feed and a house to pay for – so when someone wants you, it's hard to say no. The problem is that making topical jokes and movie jokes is not his wheelhouse. Koy's main act is slightly self-deprecating satirical jokes about his ethnic family's quirks, the foibles of how different Asian and ethnic groups interact with each other in America, and general observations about everyday society. This guy has no idea how to make a good Taylor Swift joke, but very few comedians do. Outside of his range, he was lost at sea, and it was painful to watch.

Jo Koy could have adopted the narcissism of many standup comics who think they're some special class of court jesters speaking truth to power when they're punching down, attacking certain vulnerable groups, and then crying censorship all the way to the bank. It's to his credit that he did not and chose to own his bombing. We won't name those comedians because they already take up too many column inches. Some standups think they're special just because they tell jokes in front of a paying audience. You're entertainers. When you fail to entertain, the audience lets you know and walks. That's how it worked for every enterprise throughout history, long before Capitalism came along.

The irony is the Golden Globes really don't matter and aren't relevant at all. They were always a cynical slap-together ceremony for foreign press correspondents. Everyone in the industry considered them a harmless joke with a decent bar – but still take the Oscars seriously, even though the studios created the Oscars originally as a marketing tool to hype the movies to up their box office. At least the Oscar voters are Academy members who actually work in the industry, or at least 70% of them do. Who votes for the Golden Globes? Not industry people but foreign correspondents from some unknown newspaper or news station in Europe lucky enough to live in Los Angeles. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has been considered a joke for decades. Everyone in the industry always asks, "Who the hell are these guys?" then accepts the invitation to promote their movies and mostly get drunk there. With this year's ceremony being voted on by a pool of 300+ journalists from around the world to correct ethics accusations and increase the diversity of the voting pool, let's see if matters improve.

The other irony is that Jo Koy's bombing at the Golden Globes has gotten him the most media, public, and social media attention in his career for years. It's just unfortunate that he is now known as the comedian who wasn't funny hosting the Golden Globes and has to defend himself for failing to be funny during the ceremony.

If you want to hire an amiable comedian who tells harmless jokes about the foibles of how Asians interact with each other in America for your daughter's bat mitzvah, now you can add Jo Koy's name to your list.

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