LOS ANGELES – 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 scrutinising the material in real time.
After Filipino-American stand-up comedian Jo Koy’s performance as the host of the 2024 Golden Globes drew criticism, he acknowledged that it had been “a tough room”.
“Well, I had fun. You know, it was a moment that I’ll always remember,” Koy, 52, said on Jan 8 on the ABC programme GMA3, noting that he had only 1½ weeks to prepare.
“It’s a tough room. And it was a hard job, I’m not going to lie. Getting that gig, and then having the amount of time that we had to prepare – that was a crash course.”
At the awards show on Jan 7 night (US time), parts of Koy’s opening monologue seemed to fall flat in the ballroom, drawing a defensive aside from the funnyman on stage.
“I got the gig 10 days ago,” he said. “You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down, I wrote some of these – and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
Koy’s material gravitated towards more standard celebrity teasing.
In 2023, when American stand-up Jerrod Carmichael was the host, he delivered a provocative performance, immediately addressing the turmoil over a lack of black voting members at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organisation that ran the Golden Globes until it was dissolved.
Koy’s opener did address diversity, pointing out the whiteness in the room, but it otherwise stuck with more standard fare, including a joke about Hollywood’s favourite weight loss drug.
“By the way, The Color Purple is also what happens to your butt when you take Ozempic,” he joked.
Many of the on-screen cutaways showed tepid reactions, but the responses on social media and from some critics were harsher.
A headline in British newspaper The Guardian read: “The joke’s on Jo Koy: Golden Globes host delivers a bad gig for the ages.”
Koy said in the interview that he would be lying if he said the criticism did not hurt.
“I hit a little moment there where I was like, ‘Ah, hosting is just a tough gig’,” he said. “Yes, I am a stand-up comic, but that hosting position, it’s a different style.”
One reaction from the crowd became an instant meme. When Koy joked that the Globes would have “fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” than National Football League (NFL) telecasts – referring to the frequent reaction shots of the American pop star’s recent appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games to cheer on the team’s tight end, her boyfriend Travis Kelce – Swift, who was seated in the audience, looked unamused, coolly sipping from her drink.
In his interview, Koy said that the joke fell “just a little flat”.
Despite the negativity, viewership for the show rose 50 per cent from 2023, averaging 9.4 million live viewers on American broadcaster CBS, according to Nielsen ratings data released on Jan 8.
A year ago, the Globes attracted 6.3 million viewers to the ceremony on Comcast’s NBC. The show switched networks after organisers made reforms to address a diversity and ethics scandal, and the Globes was sold to new owners.
This year’s show followed an NFL game, the most popular programming on American television, and took place on a Sunday (US time), which is typically the highest-rated night of the week. NBC aired the Globes on a Tuesday in 2023.
The Globes also streamed live to Paramount+ with Showtime subscribers. CBS said the show was the second-largest live-streamed CBS special event ever on Paramount+, but the network did not provide the number of streaming viewers.
Viewership on traditional television, including awards shows, has been declining for years as fans switch to streaming TV platforms and social media sites such as TikTok. Back in 2020, the Globes audience hit 18.3 million TV viewers.
The Oscars, the highest-rated Hollywood awards show, pulled in 18.7 million viewers on ABC in 2023. NYTIMES, REUTERS
