People tune in to see award shows every year. Although everyone wants to see who won the awards, the people who host them play an enormous role in the entertainment factor of the show. In the last couple of years, award shows have made many unsuccessful jokes that made the audience uncomfortable. From slapping someone for making a joke about their wife to Jo Koy disregarding women.
One of the most recent award shows this year was the 81st Golden Globe Awards. Celebrities from all over were seated to watch awards given to projects like Oppenheimer, Barbie, The Bear, and more. Jo Koy is a Phillipino comedian who is popular for stand-up comedy. He frequently shows up on late-night shows, but recently has been popular due to his offensive jokes at the Golden Globes. While hosting them he was given time to tell some jokes about the projects nominated.
After complimenting Oppenheimer on its beautiful writing and its history, he went on to make a joke about how Barbie was just a movie about a doll and continued to say derogatory and sexist comments about it.
That wasn’t the only joke he made about women that night either. This just opens up a new perspective to people about these jokes. Yes, some might be considered funny, but others are just rude and offensive.
Many of these jokes erase the work that women have done to get to where they are. Several people were angry particularly at the Barbie joke, as seen online and by the audience sitting in the crowd. On the screen, you can hear a laugh track playing. However, if you look at the faces of the audience, nobody laughed. They had straight faces, and some even bowed their heads in what looked like disappointment. When the camera switched to who the joke was directed to, they also looked irritated, with fake smiles or no smile at all.
The Barbie movie is one of the only movies that many people have seen that purposefully places women above men for once. Jo Koy stated that Oppenheimer was “based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project,” and that Barbie was based on a “plastic doll with big boobies.” The whole point of the movie was to uplift women and to bring them in the spotlight in the way that men have always been. The joke that Jo Koy made completely erases the whole point of what the movie was about.
These jokes always get hate, so why do people keep making them? It makes people think, how many of these jokes have been made that just fly over our heads?
We see this in the case of Matt Rife as well. Matt Rife is a popular comedian on apps like Instagram and TikTok. He was complimented for his jokes and his fast comebacks. Over time, however, people started to notice that a lot of his jokes were sexist to women. He has made many domestic violence jokes, as well as many women “cooking” jokes. Now he isn’t as popular, but with the attention he was getting even while making uncomfortable jokes, it explains how many jokes are taken so lightly.
Women have been dehumanized for years. Throughout our time, women have always been placed in a position lower than men. Now that we live in a time where women are tried to be placed in a spot equal to men, people still find a way to push us down. Hidden and open jokes made in public or on television aren’t new, yet with all the disagreement towards them, when will they stop?
Written by Staff Writer, Victoria Gonzalez