It wasn’t easy finding a host for the 81st Golden Globe Awards this year, the first iteration of the awards show run by Dick Clark Productions, who took control over it from the scandal-ridden Hollywood Foreign Press Association. (Full disclosure: Rolling Stone’s parent company, PMC, owns Dick Clark Productions.)
A number of high-profile comedians reportedly turned down the gig, perhaps owing to a lack of prep time given its proximity to the end of the actors’ strike and the HFPA’s past, including former Oscars host Chris Rock, Ali Wong, and the trio of Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes, who co-host the “SmartLess” podcast. On Dec. 21, stand-up comic Jo Koy was announced as its last-minute host — just a couple of weeks before the Jan. 7 ceremony, which was broadcast on CBS for the first time. And the rush job showed during Koy’s monologue.
“The minute I signed the contract… I locked myself in a room and started binge-watching everything. While my family was clinking champagne glasses and ringing in the New Year, my family was watching Oppenheimer,” said Koy. “I loved Oppenheimer. I just got one complaint: [It] needed another hour, because I felt like it needed some more backstory. My New Year’s resolution for 2024 is to finish Oppenheimer in 2025. I love Oppenheimer — especially the first season.” As the camera cut to an unamused Christopher Nolan, Koy added, “That’s so stupid…”
Things got worse from there, when he moved on to the other half of Barbenheimer.
“Oppenheimer and Barbie are competing for cinematic box office achievement,” Koy offered. “Oppenheimer is based on a 724-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is based on a plastic doll with big boobies” — which drew jeers and some boos from the crowd.
Koy continued: “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.’”
When this joke attracted groans and few laughs, Koy laid the blame on his joke writers.
“Some I wrote, some other people wrote,” he explained, adding, “Yo, I got the gig ten days ago! You want a perfect monologue? Shut up! You’re kidding me, right? I wrote some of these, and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
There were a few genuinely funny jokes buried in Koy’s monologue, including a fun jab at 80-year-old Robert De Niro for how exactly he got his partner pregnant at such an old age, but Koy had already lost the crowd.
It’s hard to blame the guy though given that it was not only his first time hosting an awards show but he had very little time to get his act together.
