From ‘Pinoy pride’ to ‘deep shame’: Filipinos turn on US comedian Jo Koy after Golden Globes fiasco
- Jo Koy’s Golden Globes performance sparked harsh criticism in the Philippines, with some deeming him to be an ‘embarrassment to all Filipinos’
- Experts say a key factor is the double-edged nature of ‘Pinoy pride’, a collective sense of ownership over Filipinos’ successes and failures on the global stage
The terms “Jo Koy” and “Golden Globes” trended among Filipino users on the platform X, after the Filipino-American fronted the awards show on January 7 with jokes that critics said were unfunny, crass and misogynistic.
His barbs about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film were particularly reviled. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies,” he said.
“The key moment in Barbie is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. Or what casting directors call a character actor,” he continued, to groans from the celebrity audience.
The assessments of his performance were brutal, with reviewers describing it as a “catastrophe” and “profoundly uncomfortable”. But some of the harshest comments came from the Philippines.
“My grandma survived WWII and she’s never seen a Filipino bomb this hard,” one X user said in a post that received more than 8,000 likes.