Count Jo Koy as one person who thinks his Golden Globes hosting wasn’t a complete disaster.
“I think I did well given the circumstances,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Koy had just 10 days to prepare. He told the Times his writers weren’t picked until eight days before the show; there was no writers room until two days before, and the monologue was done the day before.
“We were still writing up until they said we’re live,” Koy said. “Absolute cold reads, never got a chance to work out anything. And this is not an excuse, I’m just trying to paint the picture because I don’t think people understand, in any situation, how is that geared towards winning? If you were to write that situation down on a piece of paper and go, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I guarantee everyone would be like ‘No.’ I’m happy I did it because I did accept that challenge.”
Koy said, “I’m gonna give myself an A-plus just based on the courage [to host the show]. I’m going to hit it over the head a million times, whoever you can think of in your head that could have done it, I’m telling you right now they said no and I didn’t. I looked at it in a different light. The history of the show is 81 years. That’s 81 hosts and some repeated. I’m the first Asian to ever solo host. It’s 2024, I’m the first out of 81 years. Sandra Oh was the first co-host, but I was the first solo host. Imagine if someone said yes before me, we’d still be at the 82nd Golden Globes and still no Asian as a solo host, so if I didn’t say yes, there still would never have been.”
The one joke that didn’t land, but stirred up a hornet’s nest, involved Taylor Swift. She was not amused by a reference to her NFL high television profile while watching her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.
“I didn’t understand the Taylor [Swift] tiff,” Koy said. “Mind you, that one was just getting rewritten 50 million times, never ran it through, all the way up until we had to walk out. It’s just weird, where do you place it, and and we kept hammering it and cutting it down. But the whole intention of that joke was to make fun of the NFL. It’s like, the cool thing about the [Golden] Globes is we don’t need to do cutaways for ratings. What hurts the most is me just supporting Taylor, I support her, I love her work. I got nieces that I bought tickets for. There’s no ill intent in that joke. The joke is about the NFL and how they keep using cutaways to [her]. And it’s an obvious reason why.
“I’m not saying anything that no one’s saying,and it’s obvious what that joke was. It’s about the NFL. It’s like out of everything that has happened this is the one you choose to go after. I didn’t understand why because it was fun when I walked out. Robert De Niro was dying, like, and I’m looking at him and his wife was smacking his back and smiling and laughing and he was laughing. And when I did the whole thing about him being 80 he loved it. And that was fun. I was like, man, this guy’s so much fun. And then I did that [Swift] joke and I’m like, what just happened?”
