On Jan. 7 2024, the 81st annual Golden Globes took place in Beverly Hills, California, awarding excellence in film and television. The host for this year was comedian and actor Jo Koy. During the ceremony, when Koy gave his monologue, he said that Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, but then he made a derogatory comment about Barbie and her body, and the audience barely laughed.
I believe this to be disgusting. A host of an awards show should make funny jokes and not diminish women with a comment about her body and not her accomplishments.
Barbie is a joyous celebration of what it means to be a human and understand our emotions, and more specifically what it means to be a woman in a patriarchy-led society, represented through Barbie and her journey through the real world. It is a way to reconnect to our inner child displayed in the most accessible way for the world to see. Reducing a brilliant movie which encaptures the struggles of being a woman in the 21st century to a derogatory comment, shows why Barbie was made in the first place. Barbie went on to win the award for cinematic and box office achievement later in the night.
After the backlash of the comments surfaced on social media, Koy went to defend himself during an interview with GMA3 saying his writers wrote most of it, not him.
Koy has been a stand-up comedian since 1994 and it baffles me that he’s been making comedy for that long and didn’t think to recognize these jokes as offensive. If you are talking to a whole crowd of celebrities, and are on national television, you should look over what you’re going to say. Especially when their are girls and boys of all ages watching from home.
Comedy should navigate taboo subjects and invite the audience to see the tension which exists around it. Derogatory Barbie jokes aren’t funny, they just reduce women to objects and/or the men around them. The reason why women don’t laugh at them isn’t because we can’t take a joke, it’s because it’s not a funny joke.
