Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jo Koy: Live From The Los Angeles Forum’ On Netflix, A Comedian Who Teaches Us More About Tabo Than Taboos

Jo Koy’s fourth Netflix special delights in instant nostalgia for life during the pandemic, but also goes farther back personally for the comedian as he reminds us how much he had to hustle to sell his first hour to Netflix, and why he chose his follow-up projects. There’s no mention of Easter Sunday or Chelsea Handler here, but there’s plenty of jokes about his relationships with his mom and with his teen-age son. 

JO KOY: LIVE FROM THE LOS ANGELES FORUM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jo Koy has filmed stand-up specials in Seattle, Hawaii, and the Philippines, but nothing matches the massiveness of headlining The Forum in Inglewood, south of Los Angeles. Koy feels and cherishes that energy, along with the two-year wait to do the gig, filling the arena with jokes about the pandemic, living with sleep apnea, parenting his son, and expressing the need to tell stories in his mom’s voice. Accent and all.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: If you’re a fan of Sebastian Maniscalco‘s physicality and energy, but your heritage has more influences from the remnants of the Spanish Empire, then you’ll likely dig what Koy has to offer here, whether you’re Filipino or Mexican.
Memorable Jokes: Just as with Maniscalco, the joy with Koy comes from watching him act out scenes and stories from his life.
Explaining sleep apnea, he first re-enacts his mother filming him snoring, then shifts demonstrating what camcorders were for the kids too young to remember them, then asks us to visualize how the sounds of apnea snoring might be grossly and ghastly sexual, and then later pitches a front-row audience member starring in an informercial for CPAP machines. “I’m selling CPAP machines at the merch booth,” Koy joked, adding an imagined testimonial: “Not only was Jo Koy funny, but I think he saved my life.”
The Filipino tradition of using tabo cups by the toilet gets a thorough workout, giving Koy the opportunity to shout-out how much he loves comedy as a tool for communicating cultural differences, while also providing him with a moment to showcase all of the Mexicans in his audience.

For the American women who still use toilet paper instead of tabos or bidets, Koy gets into nitty-gritty details about the potential pitfalls of that, complete with graphic act-outs and a coined phrase: “Clitty litter.”
When he turns his attention back to his own son, Koy has two rather involved bits; the first, about changing attitudes toward school water fountains (which, frankly, Gary Gulman covered better in his 2019 HBO special, The Great Depresh); the other, about how FaceTime and security camera apps mean his son can’t get away with too much shenanigans while Koy is away from home.

Our Take: Perhaps the most memorable and impactful act outs come at the end of his hour-plus, when he decides he needs us to remember what he has been through just since 2016, when he sold his first special to Netflix after not only paying to produce it, but also doing much of the post-production work himself. Despite standing in front of a packed arena, or perhaps as a show of strength for standing there to deliver his fourth Netflix special, Koy feels determined to remind everyone that the streaming giant kept telling him no just six years earlier. He offers a brief apology (“I’m sorry I turned this into a TED talk”) but then, more assuredly, makes the point that not everyone gets “a fair shake” from show business, or the world, even.
He singles out a moment from that time period, where he prepared a TV routine to promote Live From Seattle, only to have an unnamed show/producer ask him to drop the Filipino accent he uses to impersonate his mother. “You don’t want her voice to be heard on the show?” Koy asks now. “Did Jeff Foxworthy get the same note?…Because he has an accent. He’s an American. He speaks English.”
All of which puts Koy’s second and third Netflix specials into deeper context. He chose to film in Hawaii and in the Philippines precisely to showcase the culture and voices of Pacific Islanders. His Tommy Lee story is not merely a name-drop, but more of a chance to promote tourism to the Philippines, as well as his own Netflix pitch for an Emmy-worthy docudrama about Arnel Pineda becoming the lead singer of Journey. Heck, since the 2012 documentary Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere right now, why not green-light Koy’s series?

Our Call: STREAM IT. I really do want to see Koy or any comedian pull up with a merch table as intricate and eccentric as the one he imagined in this hour.

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.