Jo Koy proved exactly one point when he took to the stage to deliver his criminally un-funny monologue at the 2024 Golden Globes on Sunday. Some people truly, deeply believe that it’s always going to be okay to use breasts as a punchline. That it’s always going to be okay to minimize women based on whatever you like, so long as you call it a joke. Fortunately for the rest of the world that is not, nobody really agreed that Jo Koy’s Barbie jokes were okay. Or funny. Instead, many social media users felt like his jokes spoke to the entire point of Greta Gerwig’s empowering blockbuster movie.
The comedian took to the stage on Sunday night as a first-time host for the Golden Globes, and things got awkward quickly. Especially when he addressed two of the biggest movies of the year, Oppenheimer and Barbie. The 51-year-old male comedian noted 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 acting,” and received tepid laughter at best. But that didn’t stop him from going in for the kill by comparing the two movies. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721 page Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Manhattan Project and Barbie is based on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
Diminishing the entire plot of Barbie, a film made to empower women and girls around the world, simply by using the patronizing word “boobies” was a true low point of the night. Especially when juxtaposed against the work of a film made by a man and largely about men. And it seemed the irony of this comment was only lost on Koy.
One social media user noted that there is a literal speech in Barbie about how difficult it is to be a woman in a man’s world, making Koy’s comparison especially awful.
This person noticed that the audience at the Golden Globes didn’t exactly love the joke either.
It wasn’t simply that Koy’s joke was unfunny and patronizing to women. It was the fact that, like so many others have done before him, he chose to “shift focus to women’s looks, and sexualize it in the process,” as this person wisely pointed out.
His ignorance also spoke to exactly why so many women related to Barbie.
For the record, women obviously do amazing, important, creative works without their “big boobies” being a plotline. In fact, I’ve seen the Barbie movie twice and do not remember any mention of “boobies” at all. Almost as though they weren’t the driving force behind anything. Almost as though they are just one of our many body parts that do not, in any way, define who we are.
What a concept.
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