Jo Koy, the Golden Globes and becoming well-read without reading anything (OBSESSED #10)

My god, that monologue!

Hello! Last night, I had a dream that I Windexed my bottle of Windex. It was awesome. When I woke up, I immediately thought about all the little dots of dried Windex on my Windex bottle under the sink, and it took every ounce of restraint not to Windex the hell outta that Windex bottle, right then, at 3:18 a.m. ET. My brain is healthy, and its demands always make perfect sense.

---

Some things that have consumed me as of late:

Because I’m constantly on the razor’s edge of technological advancements, I’ve got to ask … have y’all heard of audiobooks? Or, is this one of those instances where I’m 89 years late to a hip trend? The answer to both of those questions is “yes,” but I am still a hip person with many thoughts to share, so forgive me for espousing the benefits of something that’s been around for a century.

After one day of listening-slash-reading (I’m now waiting for somebody to invent a tool that lets me use the hyphenated verb napping-slash-slaying!), I’m already 97 pages into “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” a 441-page tome and narrative reporting masterpiece about the Sackler family, the history of America’s privatized pharmaceutical industry, and the general ways in which money and people tend to ruin anything good.

That summary probably makes “Empire of Pain” sound complicated or inaccessible or overstuffed with jargon, but fear not! This thing is accessibly written, and reads like a mystery novel where you already know the murderer gets away with it, but you keep reading ‘cause there’s just so much awful shit you need to know about this murderer if you’re gonna get properly angry. (That horned man on the gorgeous OBSESSED graphic is Arthur Sackler, the kingpin of opioids, and I hope he’s rotting in a cosmic swamp of FIRE and BRIMSTONE and THE EXPIRED SIGGIS YOGURT THAT MADE ME PUKE YESTERDAY!)

Here’s the part I can’t get over: I’m reading this book for free — and you can, too! If you live in a place, you live near a library. And if you get your library card (a gorgeous act of community engagement that costs zero dollars), you can listen to audiobooks, all the time, for free, on the Libby app. Did you read that? Did you read that part where I told you how to access any book you’d ever want … for free? Let me make myself clear: if you’ve ever wanted to be “well-read” without having to, uh, read, this is not a drill. You just need to go to your library. Please, god, step foot in your local library.

Imagine, a world where every hour someone listened to “The Joe Rogan Experience” became an hour spent listening to “Don Quixote.” Think of how much better our roads and ship channels would be. Hell, I’d settle for a world where an hour spent listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!” became an hour spent reading “Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be” (an absolutely deranged subtitle that deserves its own wing in the Idiot Louvre). That world would involve a lot more multi-level marketing schemes, though.

---

Woof, those Golden Globes! What a brutal night for our richest artists! And my god, did Jo Koy beef that monologue. Koy isn’t a household name, but — here’s an opinion that may be unpopular right now? — I’ve loved him for years. He’s easily the biggest Filipino comedian right now, and a ton of his material is specific to the experience of growing up as a second-generation Filipino immigrant. My husband’s also a second-generation Filipino immigrant to ye ol’ States, so we’ve watched a ton of Koy’s specials over the years with his family. Koy isn’t revolutionary, and his joke writing isn’t, like, prodigious. But he’s always seemed a lot kinder than those lame-ass Globes jokes suggest. I particularly enjoyed Koy’s 2022 special, “Jo Koy: Live From The Los Angeles Forum” — there’s a truly gorgeous moment in there about accents, and who we regard as having accents.

But, my god. When one of Koy’s jokes awful jokes fell flat at the Globes, he threw his writers under the bus, saying that they wrote the stuff that the audience wasn’t laughing at, and he wrote the jokes that were landing. That might be true. His worst joke — in which he said that 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” — bears zero resemblance to any joke I’ve heard from him in maybe a decade.

But, even if that’s true — even if Koy’s jokes were the few that worked, and his writers’ jokes mostly fell flat — it’s a desperate, shitty look to immediately throw others under the bus when something doesn’t work.

Nobody said it wasn’t a tough gig — I know scores of coalminers and longshoremen who shudder at the thought of hosting an awards show. But if you’re gonna sign up to tell jokes on stage, a pretty big job requirement is that you, uh, feel comfortable telling those jokes. If you think the jokes suck, don’t say them. If you don’t wanna tell jokes that A) you didn’t write, and B) you can’t personally stand behind … don’t take the gig that asks just that of the comedian! And when you say those shitty jokes, and people react appropriately to shitty jokes, throwing your hands up and saying “It wasn’t me!” is kinda like saying the car crashed into the light pole because the GPS told you to run into it.

As for the Taylor Swift of it all … have we considered that she might’ve known they’d cut to her? That the sip of wine heard ‘round the world might’ve been … planned? Or, maybe it wasn’t, and Swift was annoyed at Koy’s joke that precipitated that fateful sip: that the Golden Globes have “fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” than the NFL. I don’t know. I don’t care. If there’s one more news cycle about what Taylor Swift’s slower-than-usual blink means for global affairs, I’m going to take a muscle relaxer.

---

The salsa that comes closest to satisfying my itch for Tex-Mex? A Whole Foods 365 salsa that I gobbled up so quickly, I forgot to write down its flavor (that’s absolutely not the correct word to use here).

If you’re a Texan living elsewhere, I’m sorry and you’re welcome for this morsel of information that’s both unhelpful and stressful, because now you’ve got to buy a bunch of salsa from Whole Foods to figure out which one I’m talking about.

---