Comedian Jo Koy did not have an especially good week this past week—and most especially did not have a good 10 minutes or so last Sunday night, when he was generally held to have beefed it, big-time, on the stage of the Golden Globes. Koy referenced that previous gig at his latest one on Friday evening, Variety reports—performing a stand-up set for a far more receptive audience in St. Louis—in which he referred to the various famouses who thinly smiled at his jokes about them at the Globes as “marshmallows.”
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“Lot a marshmallows, man,” Koy told his cheering crowed, never referencing the Globes by name. “They’re delicious, but goddamn, they’re soft. I just come from a different time. I see the changes that are happening. I get it, but goddamn, can we fucking laugh at ourselves?” Referring to his return to standard stand-up as “therapy,” and calling the audience reaction a “big hug,” Koy was apparently back in his element, riffing with the crowd and using practiced material, rather than a celebrity-based monologue he says he’d only had 10 days to write (working with a team he admits he threw under the bus when things started going pear-shaped on stage).
Koy’s monologue—which included comments about Barry Keoghan’s penis in Saltburn, and a reference to Barbie as a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies”—has kicked off a wider conversation about the gig of hosting an awards show. Former Oscars host Steve Martin called on people to cut Koy some slack, referencing the high-wire nature of the job, while Kevin Hart—who famously pulled out of hosting the Academy Awards in 2018 after people resurfaced homophobic comments from him online—declared that award shows aren’t “comedy-friendly environments anymore.” (Meanwhile, our social media feeds have been flooded with clips of John Mulaney absolutely killing it at a recent Governor’s Award ceremony with laser-precise riffs on pop culture, but so it goes.) It is, undeniably, an incredibly hard position to be in—lobbing jokes about incredibly famous people to those people, while millions of spectators watch—and Koy, at least, seems happy to be back with more familiar territory and fans.