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JO KOY IS A FUNNY GUY.
His resume speaks for itself: the stand-up comic went from performing at a Las Vegas coffee house to selling out theaters and arenas around the world.
His funniest jokes? The stories about his Filipino mother and his upbringing. His real name is Joseph Glenn Herbert, but most of everyone knows him as “Josep!” complete with his mom’s Pinoy accent.
His latest production, a Netflix special “Jo Koy: Comin’ In Hot,” dropped globally last month, transporting viewers to Honolulu’s Blaisdell Arena for a night of fun. The place was packed: thousands people from all races came to see Jo Koy.
How does a Filipino-American stand-up comic draw such a crowd? Speaking to Jo Koy on the phone, GMA News Online attempted to find out.
He sounds warm on the phone. When told that we were given an advanced screening for “Comin’ In Hot,” he switches to the voice he uses to imitate his Filipino mom: “Lucky, ha!” He makes it a point to remember names and uses them often; whenever he manages to prompt laughter in the line, he pauses and laughs too, sharing the moment.
“It’s incredible,” he says, talking about shooting his special in Honolulu, (where there is such a thing as Jo Koy Day!). “The island really embraced me, to see everybody come out and laugh together was just so much fun.”
And Jo Koy loves all of it: having fun, making fun, and poking fun. And he just loves when people laugh with him, at him, and at his stories.
“I think one thing I really wanted to make sure what happened in my stand-up is that everybody was laughing at relatable situations. I wanted people to laugh with me about my upbringing,” he says.
It’s Jo Koy’s stories about his “Filipino mom” that always draw the biggest laughter. He rarely mentions her name, so it is usually her being Filipino that people remember. Clips of him talking about his upbringing that get the most likes on social media. His most popular bit is arguably the one about Vicks VapoRub, with which his mom has this strange obsession. Jo Koy says people from everywhere would approach him and tell him their moms are the same.
“I wanted people to relate to it... so that way when people hear stories from my mom and I, they go, ‘Hey, my mom does that as well,’” he says.
“And it could be anyone from a white family, black family, Latino family, or other Asians. It doesn’t matter, moms are moms. And it was cool that people embraced the stories the way they did,” he adds.
JO KOY FULLY EMBRACES his Filipino lineage, proudly uses the pronouns “us” and “we” when referring to Filipinos. But he’s actually half white: his father is an American, a former member of the United States Air Force.
His parents met during the Vietnam War in… well, Vietnam. His mom worked in the country as an entertainer; until now Jo Koy is not quite sure what that entailed.
Given his father’s job, their family — aside from his parents, there was his half-brother, half-sister, and adopted sister — moved around a lot.
“And the reason I embraced my Filipino side… There was a time where we all got to live in the Philippines for almost six years, so that was a very big part of my life,” he says.
But in a conversation on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Jo Koy said he would always think of Tacoma, Washington as his hometown.
“That's the time of my life where everything fell apart. My family fell apart. I was like 10,” he told Maron.
Jo Koy would remember the woods, the cold, the rain, and his older brother, Robert, battling severe schizophrenia. He would remember Robert insisting he was a tiger and attacking his dad, hitting his mom and giving her a black eye, needing to be contained by several cops.
Jo Koy's father, John Herbert, served in the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War. Instagram: Jo Koy
Jo Koy's mom, Josie, features heavily in most, if not all, his shows. Instagram: Jo Koy
Around that time too, his father would divorce his mom and walk out on their family.
Jo Koy used to resent his brother and hate his father. But now that he’s older, he gets it. “I don't need my dad to tell me. I know. You're 28, you marry a woman with two kids, one’s eight, one’s twelve, he’s schizophrenic, he’s beating the shit out of you. I get it, I get why you left,” he told Maron.
As a result, however, he never formed a close relationship with his father’s side of the family. It was his mother’s Filipino side who raised him; it was in fact one of his Pinay titas who dubbed him “Jo Koy.”
“So that’s why I talk about it so much, I embrace it so much because it was my mom’s brothers and sisters that were basically raising me. So I think that’s what I love the most about my Filipino culture,” he tells us.
WITH HIS FAMILY REELING from the divorce and trying to deal with his schizophrenic brother, Jo Koy was left on the sidelines, knowing only one thing: he was a funny guy.
He found solace in watching performances of stand-up comedy in VHS tapes, an addiction that was triggered when he watched a performance by Eddie Murphy.
“I remember having tapes and listening to them and making sure my mom wasn’t around because it was like, dirty,” he said in the podcast Inside of You.
“That divorce was a bad thing, but it was also a good thing. I knew I was a funny kid, but then I just buried myself in stand-up comedy. I think I was 11 when I saw Eddie Murphy and it was over with, I couldn't stop watching stand up,” he told host Michael Rosenbaum.
When he was about 15 or 16, Jo Koy took his mom’s credit card to buy tickets to “Eddie Murphy Raw,” the comedy star’s second stand-up feature film in 1987.
The show might as well have sealed his fate, because it was then that Jo Koy decided, “I gotta do that.”
And do that he did.
THE DOING DID NOT always come easy. Like any aspiring artist, Jo Koy had his fair share of rejections, with the most painful ones ironically coming at the hands of Netflix.
Yes, Jo Koy now has two specials in the streaming service: “Jo Koy: Live From Seattle,” and “Jo Koy: Comin’ In Hot.” But when Netflix announced in 2015 that they were going to do a big push for stand-up comedy, they passed on him.
“I didn’t want to go to Comedy Central again, I want to be on Netflix. And we kept pursuing them, kept inviting them to the shows. I’m selling 18 shows in a row, like come to one, just see what I’m doing. Like, please give this to me. And they weren’t coming and then finally they were like, we’re gonna pass, we already got everybody for 2016. We’ll come out and look at you for 2017 and 2018,” he told Rosenbaum.
He was crushed at the rejection, but he didn’t take things lying down. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money to produce the special himself, determined to sell it to Netflix, even after they already said no.
“I’m glad they said no, because maybe it wouldn’t have shown in my performance that night. ‘Cause I was hungry that night. I had everything on my back that night. I had to f—ing kill tonight,” he said on the podcast.
There was one moment during that live show when he knew that he was indeed killing it. By now the moment is iconic, having gone viral on social media and receiving more than three million views on his YouTube channel: “Elevate the feet!”
"When I ad libbed this one bit where I go, ‘Elevate the feet. Are you fucking stupid?’ I remember when I said this, I go, I got these people right now,” he said.
His efforts paid off: Netflix bought the special, gave him back his money and even doubled it.
MANY OF JO KOY’S best bits include heavy doses Filipino culture: asking “Ha?” when asking others to repeat what they were saying; the weird addiction to the SkyFlakes baon in his mom’s bag; the tabo, the Vicks VapoRub, the adobo.
His very Pinay mother is his go-to joke, and she often pops up on his Instagram account with her now iconic accent; he would poke fun at her short hair and glasses and her obsession with Louis Vitton. On YouTube, he posted a video of the two of them going to a Filipino Food Buffet in Las Vegas, with his mom explaining what dinuguan and kare-kare are made of.
In “Comin’ In Hot,” Jo Koy refers to Filipinos as the “Mexicans of Asia.” He even inserted a tidbit about how the Spaniards colonized the Philippines for a few hundred years.
“I wanted people to understand why Latinos and Filipinos relate on so many other levels. I wanted to give a history lesson, basically,” he tells GMA News Online.
Jo Koy has made it his mission to educate whoever is watching or listening to him about Pinoy culture, in a very funny, if stereotypical way. As a result, his comedy has resonated beyond his background.
He mentions how Mexicans would tell him, “My mom is like your mom.”
“I was getting a lot of Latinos coming to my show, and they didn’t know that Filipinos had Spanish last names. They didn’t know that we used some Spanish words in our dialect, and it was cool to do that, it was neat to share that,” he says.
While his specialty is Filipino culture, Jo Koy is not above poking fun at other nationalities too.
In “Comin’ In Hot,” he made tummies ache with his impersonations of the Vietnamese (always angry), Japanese (always exasperated), and Hawaiians (always in slippers).
In the same special, he alludes to the size of black people’s junk, and poked fun at his son (and himself) for having a small penis. His side of the family, he says.
Jo Koy knows exactly what he’s doing. He even called himself out on it onstage, laughing that he’s so insensitive, that yes he’s stereotyping, and that people get so easily offended nowadays.
In his “Elevate the Feet” bit, Jo Koy says many Filipinos are nurses. The video has more than 400,000 likes in Facebook and millions of views, so people can’t be that offended, right?
It doesn’t bother Jo Koy either way.
“Stereotyping can be looked at two ways. You can look at it as offensive, or you can look at it as something we should embrace,” he says.
“Generally, a particular ethnicity has this stereotype in this culture. And you can look at that and go, okay that’s offensive. Or you can look at that and go, well yeah a lot of Filipinos are nurses, and that’s our stereotype,” he adds.
He admits, unapologetically, that he loves pointing out these stereotypes and making fun of them. “It’s fun to make fun of stuff, it’s fun to laugh!” he says.
JO KOY DOES NOT THINK he’s offensive. And the people close to him aren’t offended when they are featured in his jokes either, he says.
His son, despite being made fun of (and exposed) in his shows, isn’t bothered at all. In fact, he sometimes participates in Jo Koy’s specials, and helps out in promotional materials.
And his mother, often the butt of the jokes, apparently loves it. Her only feedback to him: “There’s more to be told, Josep!”
“The only person I’m worried about is my mom, my sisters, or my sons, and if they aren’t offended about it, then I don’t really care about anyone else’s feelings. I really don’t,” he said.
“If you’re offended, change the channel.”
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