Hosts have the primary responsibility of keeping the crowd engaged with the flow of the entire program, as well as interacting with each of the audience in a way they see fit. However, Jo Koy’s hosting seemed to have rubbed the audience and the entire online world the wrong way, and for a good reason.
The comments that people were the most bothered about were misogynistic jokes about the Barbie film, which the cast responded to with crickets in the audience. Dubbed by Time as the “worst Golden Globes joke,” Jo Koy said, “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 … 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 actor!” The camera panned out to the crowd, including Barbie’s co-writer and director, Greta Gerwig, with a very unimpressed face.
For the worst, Jo Koy also made comments about the Taylor Swift, mentioning how the Golden Globes has fewer camera shots of her compared to the NFL. This is something the singer-songwriter has previously commented on in the aftermath of football fans complaining about her presence in Travis Kelce’s games, which the NFL loves to make noise about. Swift said in an interview prior to the Golden Globes that she is simply there to support Kelce, and she has no idea whether or not the screens are showing her. Jo Koy, making a joke about something she’s already uncomfortable about, was responded to by the global superstar with a blank face and a sip of her drink.
Jo Koy admitted to having an off night, saying he only signed to the gig 10 days before the actual event, explaining why his material wasn’t that good. “Some [jokes] I wrote, some other people wrote,” the standup comedian said after one of his lines fell flat. “Yes, 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 are the ones you are laughing at.”
Netizens still think that as the host and as someone whose mouth those words have come out of, it’s still his responsibility to be wary of the impact of the jokes he makes about people. Discerning whether or not something is misogynistic or insensitive ought to be paramount, especially when one’s job is to keep the night in the right flow.
Worst…host…ever.