Greta Gerwig on Jo Koy's Golden Globes 'Barbie' Joke: "Hes Not Wrong"

Greta Gerwig says she got the joke when Jo Koy told the Golden Globes audience on Sunday that Oppenheimer was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book but Barbie is about “a plastic doll with big boobies.”

The writer-director addressed the quip he delivered during his first Globes hosting gig while appearing on BBC Radio 4 Today. The joke has been criticized by some for being reductive or sexist, but Gerwig offered host Martha Kearney a different take on Koy’s joke.

“Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on,” she said. “And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll.”

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Gerwig went on to add that Barbie, a toy her own mother was hesitant about her playing with when she was young, “by her very construction, has no character, no story. She’s there to be projected upon.

“The insight that Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls, is she realized, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman,'” Gerwig said during the program, while discussing the doll’s creator and origins. She’s played by Rhea Pearlman in the film.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind 2023’s best performing movie at the box office added that throughout Barbie’s history — which began in 1959 — she has been at points ahead of and behind the culture, leading to contentious debates about her impact and interpretation within the larger culture.

“She’s been a villain, and she’s been a hero, but it felt like in a way even though it’s so seemingly superficial that it was such a rich place to start,” the director said of her own interest in the film.

Gerwig’s response comes the same day that Mattel announced the launch of its Barbie Women in Film Career of the Year line, inspired by both the success of the film and Gerwig as the first female director with a billion-dollar film, and aiming to spotlight opportunities available to women in the industry.

She is also among a growing number of voices who have weighed in on Koy’s jokes, including one about Taylor Swift, and the criticism around his historic hosting gig as just the second-ever Asian to helm the ceremony from the stage. On Tuesday, both Steve Martin and Whoopi Goldberg — two actor-comedians who have hosted various shows themselves — acknowledged the difficulty of playing to an awards room, before congratulating him on the job.

“I love Jo Koy. He makes me just crazy because he’s funny,” Goldberg said while hosting The View. “I don’t know whether it was the room. I don’t know whether it was the jokes. I didn’t get to see it. But I do know that he is as good as it gets when it comes to stand-up.”

“Congratulations to Jo Koy, who took on the toughest gig in show business, hit, missed, was light on his feet, and now has twenty minutes of new material for his stand up!” Martin wrote on Threads.

“I’d be lying if it doesn’t hurt,” Koy told GMA3 the morning after the awards show. “I hit a little moment there [during the monologue] where I was just like, ‘Ah.’ Hosting is a tough gig. Yes, I am a stand-up comic, but that hosting position is a different style. It’s not the same style.”

The Globes, which aired on CBS this year, averaged about 9.47 million viewers according to Nielsen’s final same-day ratings, marking a 51 percent jump from last year’s show on NBC.

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