Jo Koy spent most of the week with a frown on his face. That’s understandable, given the flat reception and disastrous reviews his last-minute host gig at Sunday’s Golden Globes received. Apparently, even a supportive public message from Steve Martin left him blue. At least, that’s what he reportedly told a supportive crowd at the Stifel Theatre in St. Louis Friday, saying “I haven’t laughed in four days.”
The gig was Koy’s first since the Globes, Variety reports, and almost didn’t happen, as the storms whipping the Midwest diverted his flight from LA. “The weather is better in Hollywood, but I’m happy to be in this blizzard. When it rains, it pours.”
The cliche was likely an allusion to a week during which Koy found himself explaining the more challenging moments of his time on the Golden Globes stage. “It’s a tough room. And it was a hard job, I’m not going to lie,” he told GMA3 Monday of a performance Vanity Fair termed “bleak and awkward.”
In a subsequent interview, Koy told the LA Times that critics who accused him of sexism fail to “understand who I am as a person … Because if you’ve ever seen me, you’ll see just how much I praise and shine light on women, from my ex-wife to my mom.”
“What happened to society where we can’t even joke with each other anymore,” Koy asked the LAT. It was a sentiment he reportedly repeated Friday, saying “I see the changes that are happening,” perhaps a reference to society’s slight progress against systemic and historic misogyny. “I get it, but goddamn, can we fucking laugh at ourselves?” (Vanity Fair reached out to Koy’s representatives for context on his remarks, but has not received a response as of publication time.)
Presumably referring to the icy yet highly memable response to some of his Globes routine by celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Koy told the St. Louis crowd that he’d faced a “Lot a marshmallows, man. They’re delicious, but goddamn, they’re soft. I just come from a different time.”
Koy also seemed to revel in the politics of the Missouri crowd, a heavily Republican state in which abortion is illegal, gender-affirming care is under fire from its attorney general, and legislators oppose accurate history education in favor of classes in “patriotism.” Despite that, Koy said “Here in St. Louis, [you’ve got] people that listen to you, understand you, and understand we’re not all out to attack each other. It’s stupid in LA.”
It’s unsurprising that the favorable comparison between liberal California and deep-red Missouri pleased the crowd, which reportedly responded with pleasure. “I haven’t laughed in four days,” Koy reportedly said in response. “You guys make me so happy.”
