Sometimes, all press isn’t good press. The 2024 award season kicked off with a bang and a lot of controversy surrounding the opening monologue of the Golden Globe Awards. The host, Jo Koy, received a lot of backlash regarding some of the jokes that he gave during his opening monologue. I thought the jokes were outdated, sexist, and hard to hear, but honestly, the reactions were even more painful.
He began by comparing two of the biggest nominees for the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, Oppenheimer and Barbie. Koy stated that “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project. And Barbie is on a plastic doll…” Koy really missed the mark with this quip. The entire message of the film is that Barbie is so much more than just a plastic doll. For me, Barbie is a symbol of all of the things that women are capable of, and all of the struggles that women have to face in order to break through their glass ceilings. As a film, Barbie emphasizes the struggles and misogyny that women face on a day to day basis. Barbie follows the journey of Stereotypical Barbie as she realizes that appearances and perfection aren’t everything that men make it out to be in our male-dominated society. Koy hit this theme right on the nose when he ironically gave a perfect example of the misogyny and sexism that women face every day when he quipped that “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.” With this joke, he completely undermined the value of the entire film. Degrading jokes like these not only offend women, but delegitimize us as equals to men, as it bases their worth and value as human beings solely on their appearances.
Koy also targeted one of the most popular singers of our time, Taylor Swift, a woman who has been fighting misogyny and sexism ever since her career began. Taylor Swift has worked hard to establish herself as a strong name in the music industry, and yet again, Koy found a way to completely undermine a woman and her achievements. He said that “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL” was that “at the Golden Globes, [they] have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.” Instead of acknowledging the amazing year she’s had as a powerful name in music, he instead minimizes her down to a woman standing behind a man, supporting her boyfriend from the sidelines.
The jokes were so bad that Koy was left defending his jokes mid set, saying things like “What? That’s hilarious!” during the middle of his performance. I thought that the set was hard to listen to, but seeing the reactions ultimately made it worse. The laughs that Koy received were few and far between. After many of his jokes, the camera cut to the audience, the majority of whom sat cringing and silent. A favorite moment of mine that exemplified the true failure of the jokes would be Selena Gomez’s reaction, who, directly after the “character actor” joke, couldn’t even keep her head up as it was so painful.
Despite the amazing advances that women have made this year in the entertainment industry, Koy’s set was a direct attack on the advancement of female power, whether or not he wrote all of the material. The Golden Globe Awards was certainly an interesting start to the 2024 award season, and I can only hope that other award shows use this event as a token of what not to do.
