For her fifth Netflix special, Jo Koy left her West Coast behind to represent the East Coast, and specifically Brooklyn, and for good reason. Koy has grown up a lot since her Netflix debut in 2017, and is now quite reflective about where she is in her life and where the kids are today. And if you do not know it, now you know it…
JO KOY: LIVE FROM BROOKLYN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: In his four previous stand-up specials for Netflix, Jo Koy joked about his place in his family — he himself is the son of a Filipino mother and a white Air Force father — and about raising his own son ( now 21 years old) as a single father.
And Koy has become increasingly successful in that time, touring from clubs to theaters to stadiums, and rising through the ranks of panelist to Chelsea lately to star in his own movie, Easter Sundayand hosted the Golden Globes earlier this year (where he got a dirty look from Taylor Swift).
He released this special right after his 53rd birthday over the weekend, and having recorded it in November in Brooklyn, he found himself at times nostalgic for how things used to be and at the same time very grateful and joyful for where he is now.
What comedy specials will it remind you of?:There’s a very overlapping thread running through both Koy’s new special and the other stand-up special that Marlon Wayans released this week on Prime Video, in that they both go out of their way to remind their audiences to respect their mothers. Although this month we are closer to Father’s Day than Mother’s Day. Go figure.
Memorable jokes: Arguing that your social media followers are not your friends, Koy argues that we should put down our phones to truly experience life. “They should call it antisocial media,” she says, describing the younger generations as “not dating anyone anymore.”
The phone also gives Koy a way to argue how much life has changed in a couple of generations, describing how we used to have to take our selfies to develop them and wait for the results, and how, in his case, that led to his reasoning. Mom’s superstition about the “orbs” in some of the photos. “It was a dirty lens,” Koy recalls now. “But we put that painting on the altar for six months!”
He then uses the idea of generation gaps to demonstrate the stark difference between what his father used to call “the hippity-hoppity” and what Koy himself now describes as “mumble-mumble,” driving the joke home with the help of a DJ, first. He plays a bit of “Lifestyle” by Young Thug, before starting with “Hypnotize” by The Notorious BIG, at which point the entire audience at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn goes crazy.
Koy takes more than a few minutes to poke fun at himself for getting older, pointing out that not only has he become lactose intolerant, but he also discovered he had sciatica only after seeing how he walked on stage in his previous Netflix special. At 50, he points out that it may not be his most attractive time either because he sleeps with a CPAP machine and, thanks to his sciatica diagnosis, he also discovered that he apparently has no butt.
And his big final performance, describing the birth of his son, also makes Koy the butt of the joke, so to speak.
But in the meantime, he has a lot of fun making fun of kids these days for having it easy when it comes to finding their first job as teenagers, and finds a young fan in the crowd who gives them some vital advice on respecting their mother. and checking on her dad.
Our opinion: None of the central themes of Koy’s scenes are particularly novel, but he makes the most of his takes on the premises no matter how many times you’ve heard them from someone else.
Take, for example, the story of childbirth. Many men in comedy have joked about how little they understood the plight of pregnant women until they witnessed the birth of their children, but Koy capitalizes on that and then some, recreating the multiple occasions when he passed out, as well as well as his screams of horror, as he screams at Caleb (the 12-year-old boy in the audience he highlighted earlier) to imagine his own mother giving birth to him, draws the full attention of everyone in the theater.
Similarly, there’s a level of attention to detail that Koy displays throughout the hour that not only plays to their strengths, but puts them and him at their best.
By taking note of specific audience members in the opening minutes and not mocking them but celebrating their reactions to his first jokes, Koy establishes himself as a master of live stand-up.
He says he enjoys New York City because the city’s melting pot and tight neighborhoods have forced generations of Americans to learn to live and laugh together, but also by building an inset setting that puts him front and center of that crowd (something similar to the movie Def Comedy). Brooklyn of the Jam Biggie era), allows himself to feed off their energy.
All of which makes him the opposite of the “energy vampires” he bemoans at the end of the minute.
The only strange moment is when he suggests that the Brooklyn crowd should punish those energy vampires outside in the parking lot after the show. Parking lot? Outside the Kings Theater? Maybe Koy didn’t have time to know. But now he knows.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. This is a thoroughly enjoyable hour, which while it may not represent any kind of breakthrough or innovative new use of stand-up comedy, it certainly shows Jo Koy at the peak of his comedic powers.
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