Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
For his third stand-up special, first in five years and first for Netflix, Jo Koy went back to where it all began for him.
The son of a white Air Force father and a Filipino mother grew up near McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Koy didn’t start his comedy career until he and his mother had move to Las Vegas, but he has come home, so to speak, for Netflix’s Jo Koy: Live from Seattle.
Koy’s comedy heritage is as mixed as his genetic one. In his earlier years, bursting onto the scene through Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Lately, he gave off the physical vibes of a Dane Cook with the elaborate fascination and disgust with his son as Louis CK had with his daughters. A ripe cocktail ready-made for Hollywood to drink up in 2009.
Several years later, Koy is a regular fixture for listeners of Adam Carolla’s podcast, but for Netflix viewers, this hour represents their first chance taken on him. He’ll tell you straight up he’s the kind of performer who wants to make a woman laugh so hard, she’ll not only threaten to pee her pants, but then proceed to do so.
Here’s an extended clip from Koy talking about his own upbringing:
If Live from Seattle has a narrative through line or hook to hang the hour upon, it’s the humor in comparing how his Filipino mother treated him at 12 and 13 shortly after his folks divorced, with how Koy treats his own son at the same age now that he’s a single father himself.
Comedian wasn’t in the plan or in the cards for Koy, according to his mother. “Filipino moms predetermine what their kids are supposed to be when they grow up,” he explains. “It’s either nurse or mailman.”
If she disparaged his American dreams of stand-up comedy and acting, then at least that’s better than what Koy has to put up with his from his son. It sounds like Koy and Gabriel Iglesias could form a support group, if they haven’t already, for comedian fathers of teen-age boys with poor hygiene habits. That said, Koy has saved up his comedy earnings in case he has to support his son until the age of 28, which is how old he was when he finally left his mother’s household and care. Of course, taking care of his son’s financial needs also has spoiled him to the point where he doesn’t even recognize a school bus. “You gotta go to school on a bus. That s–t will make you humble. Go to school on a bus with a bunch of kids that hate their f—ing life.”
Koy also admits funding his own guilty pleasures in the name of buying gifts for his son.
One thing he’s not ready for: His son becoming a man. This leads into several minutes of acting out simulated masturbation and getting caught doing so. “We’ll move on from this. But I want to keep going,” Koy acknowledges. And so he does.
He gets worked up and gets a good workout staging scenarios in which he and his mother react to one of his older sister’s marrying a black man, how mothers should emphasize the horrors of childbirth to prompt better financial child support from their exes, and some dating advice in the guise of how men and women should go out drinking separately, then reunite at home at the end of the night.
It’s not the most mature hour. But then again, Koy is just feeling home again, and 13 again, at least in this hour, live from Seattle.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
