On January 7, 2024 the 81st annual Golden Globes award show aired, with comedian Jo Koy hosting, who had only been announced 2 weeks before the ceremony. Given little time to prepare, Koy’s… unique monologue left a lasting, yet disappointing impression on both the attending audience and viewers at home.
Koy opened his speech by prefacing that he only got the gig 10 days ago, implying that expectations should not be set high.
Koy then continued his speech by targeting celebrities, ranging from Meryl Streep to Taylor Swift, poking fun at the attention she receives from the NFL at Kansas City Chiefs games.
“The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift,” Koy said. The majority of the time, his jokes fell flat with attendees and viewers at home, as the camera panned to Swift taking a sip from her champagne.
Shay Gallagher, a sophomore at Kaiser High School, found the jokes unnecessary. “Not only were they unfunny, but they were also just out of place for such a famous award show,” she said. Gallagher also voiced how he could have used his time to uplift and entertain the audience in a more positive way, rather than targeting individuals in the audience.
One of the lowest points of the speech was when he cracked a joke, though some considered it flat-out misogyny, about the award-winning Barbie movie, contradicting the entire message of the film.
“Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies,” he said. “The key moment in Barbie is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. Or what casting directors call character actors!”
The joke left the audience visibly unimpressed, including straight-faced reactions from the Barbie cast and crew like Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, and director Greta Gerwig.
Abby Human, a sophomore at Kaiser High School, also watched the award show live and found the joke unamusing and a bit ironic. “It just wasn’t funny. It’s weird that the host of the Golden Globes would openly make such a misogynistic comment about a movie for kids,” she said.
After realizing how badly the joke bombed, Koy made matters worse by going off-script in an attempt to defend himself. “Yo, I got the gig 10 days ago, 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,” he said.
Koy started to quickly receive backlash online for the blatant misogyny in his joke, which was aired on live television. Many were upset and slightly in disbelief at how the host of the Golden Globes could reduce a movie about challenging gender stereotypes and how difficult it is to be a woman in a man’s world to simply being about a plastic doll with “big boobies.”
The following morning, Koy addressed the reactions he received. “Yes, I’m a stand-up comic but that hosting position it’s a different style. I kind of went in and did the writer’s thing. We had 10 days to write this monologue. It was a crash course. I feel bad, but I got to still say I loved what I did.”
A few days later, director Greta Gerwig made a surprising response to the joke made at the award show. “Well, he’s not wrong,” she said. “She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on. And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll. Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story, she’s there to be projected upon.”
