Hosting a Hollywood awards show can be a notoriously difficult job, with its audience of image-conscious A-list celebrities on the receiving end and a large television audience scrutinizing the material in real time. After Jo Koy’s performance as host of this year’s Golden Globes drew criticism, he acknowledged Monday that it had been “a difficult room.”
“Well, I had fun, you know, it was a moment that I’ll always remember,” Koy said Monday on ABC’s “GMA3,” noting that he had only had a week and a half to prepare. “It’s a difficult room. And it was hard work, I’m not going to lie. Getting that job and then having the amount of time we had to prepare was a crash course.”
At Sunday’s awards show, parts of Koy’s opening monologue appeared to fall flat in the ballroom, drawing a separate defense from the comedian. “I got the job 10 days ago!” he said. “Do you want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You are kidding, right? Slow down, I wrote some of these and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
Koy’s material gravitated toward more standard celebrity jibes. Last year, when Jerrod Carmichael hosted, he gave a provocative performance, immediately addressing the unrest over the lack of black voting members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that ran the Golden Globes until it disbanded.
Koy’s first speech addressed diversity, pointing out the whiteness in the room, but otherwise stuck to more standard fare, including a joke about Hollywood’s favorite weight-loss drug. (“By the way, ‘The Color Purple’ is also what happens to your butt when you take Ozempic,” she joked.)
Many of the on-screen cuts met with lukewarm reactions, but responses on social media and from some critics were harsher. (A headline in The Guardian read: “The joke is on Jo Koy: Golden Globes host gives bad gig forever.”)
Koy said in the interview that he “would be lying” if he said that criticism “doesn’t hurt.”
“I got to a little moment where I thought, ‘Oh, hosting is a hard job,’” Koy said. “Yes, I’m a comedian, but that hosting position is a different style.”
One crowd reaction became an instant meme: when Koy joked that the Globes would have “fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” than NFL broadcasts, referring to the frequent reaction shots from her recent appearances at the games. the Kansas City Chiefs to cheer on the team. tight end, Travis Kelce – Swift, who was sitting in the audience, It didn’t seem fun., coldly sipping his drink. In her interview, Koy acknowledged that the joke came off “a little flat.”
Then one of the interviewers asked: If you could do it all over again, would you accept the invitation to host?
“That’s a tough job,” he replied, “I’m not going to lie.”
