Do we like Jo Koy?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A comic with a self-made career and one apologised-for slur, whose Golden Globes jokes landed badly, with no campaigning against anyone in what turned up.
Jo Koy is a half-Filipino, half-white comic who grew up in Seattle and started stand-up in 1989. He got his big break on Jay Leno's Tonight Show in 2005 and became a regular on Chelsea Lately. Then the network offers dried up, so he did what plenty of blokes only talk about.
He paid for his own special, Live from Seattle, and sold it to Netflix in 2016. He said at the time that nobody was going to hand him one, so he made it himself. That bet turned him into one of the biggest touring stand-ups going, with Filipino family stories at the centre of his act.
The ugly night is 2011. The Advocate, citing Windy City Times, reported that he was booed off the stage at a Chicago festival show after doing an exaggerated dance and then allegedly using an anti-gay slur on a heckler. He apologised publicly the next day, calling the word foul and saying homophobia is not funny.
The famous bad night is the 2024 Golden Globes. Ms. Magazine reported that his monologue called Barbie a plastic doll with big boobies and joked about the Color Purple and Ozempic. Critics called it sexist and dated, and he blamed his writers on the night. Koy said he had only ten days to write it and that the criticism hurt, and he said the Taylor Swift line was aimed at the NFL.
On the harm test, that's the whole file we could find: one slur he apologised for fifteen years ago, and one monologue that critics called sexist. We found no campaigning against trans people or anyone else, no conspiracy theories, and no pattern of working with people who push harm. That's honestly a thin record, which is why it's an asterisk rather than a clean pass.
On the good side, he built his career on Filipino American stories when Hollywood wasn't offering him any. The new special is pitched as a love letter to Stockton, once known as Little Manila. He said he doesn't talk politics on stage, so there's no culture-war grift in the act.