“She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on,” director says in aftermath of comedian’s widely panned monologue
Greta Gerwig has taken the high road in response to Jo Koy’s ill-received Barbie joke at the Golden Globes.
During the comedian’s widely panned and openly booed monologue, Koy joked about the Barbieheimer box office battle, noting that while Oppenheimer was “based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project,” Barbie was about “a plastic doll with big boobies.”
He 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.’”
Koy received plenty of backlash from the jokes, which, in addition to being unfunny, were also called sexist. While social media users, Swifties, and celebrities like Renee Rapp have blasted Koy over the monologue, Barbie director Gerwig chose not to pile on during an appearance on BBC Radio 4.
“Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on,” Gerwig said of Koy’s Barbie dig. “And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll.”
The filmmaker continued, “Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story, she’s there to be projected upon. The insight that (Barbie creator) Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls is she realized, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman.’”
