On January 7, 2024, The Golden Globes were a time to appreciate cinema and television. However, the most memorable thing from that night was the questionable jokes comedian Jo Koy had made about the movies and the people in attendance.

Jo Koy is a stand-up comedian who has worked in the industry for almost 20 years. In 2017, he broke the record for most tickets sold by a single artist in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the Neal S. Blaisdell Hall. Even with this substantial compliment, people have the question, who is this guy? 

 Koy was offered to host The Golden Globes “10 days ago,” as he says in his opening monologue, and people believed him because of the poorly written jokes he was making. Constantly throughout the program, he reminds the audience that others wrote some of the jokes he was making he wrote and. It seemed he knew those weren’t the best jokes he’d made. 

The most impressionable joke from the night was his one about Taylor Swift. “The difference between The Golden Globes and the NFL is that we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift on The Golden Globes.” Which led Taylor Swift to be unamused by the joke and not react to it. Many people believed this joke wasn’t as bad as the ones he made about the Barbie movie earlier. Swifties took to TikTok calling out Jo Koy for his ‘unfunny joke’ but claimed at this point during his monologue, ‘everyone in the room had turned against him.’

When Koy started to mention Oppenheimer and Barbie, things began to go downhill. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book based on the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies,” mild laughter with that one. People immediately after that joke came at Jo Koy’s neck, saying, this is why they made the Barbie movie in the first place; it’s behavior like this that puts women in an uncomfortable spot. While everyone was attacking Koy on the internet, Greta Gerwig, the writer and director of Barbie, stated in an interview with BBC Radio 4 Today, “Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on.” Gerwig’s response left many shocked, but everyone interprets jokes differently.

Nothing got the room to cringe as much as this next joke, “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.’” What’s funny about this clip in the video posted to YouTube is that you hear the laughter but don’t see the laughter. In the image depicted beside, you can see the sheer disappointment of Selena Gomez, who, along with others, put their heads down in embarrassment. Right after he told that joke, he made sure to make it clear, as previously stated, that some of these jokes he wrote, some others wrote. 

In an interview with GM3, Jo Koy responds to all the negative comments he’s received about his performance, stating, “I think it was when the Taylor one was just a little flat. I guess it was a weird joke; it was more on the NFL. I was trying to make fun of the NFL using cutaways.” As they do, people quickly responded to his interview, saying it wasn’t the Taylor joke. It was the Barbie joke and how he sexualized and or objectified every comment he made about the movie.

While comedy is a subjective art form, and what one person may find funny, another might not. While they might intend to keep things light-hearted and make others laugh, the delivery and execution can often fall flat, leaving people in the audience offended or uncomfortable. In the end, comedy should bring joy and laughter at the end of the day.