Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jo Koy: Live From Brooklyn’ On Netflix, Waxing Nostalgic In An Ode To Joy

For his fifth Netflix special, Jo Koy left his West Coast behind to represent the East Coast, and specifically Brooklyn, and for sound reasons. Koy has grown up a lot since his Netflix debut in 2017, and he finds himself rather reflective now about where he’s at in his life and where kids are at today. And if you don’t know, now you know…

JO KOY: LIVE FROM BROOKLYN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In his previous four stand-up specials for Netflix, Jo Koy has joked about his place in his family, himself the son of a Filipina mom and a white Air Force dad, and raising his own son (now 21) as a single father.

And Koy has gotten increasingly more successful in that time, touring from clubs to theaters to arenas, and moving up the ranks from panelist on Chelsea Lately to starring in his own movie, Easter Sunday, and hosting the Golden Globes earlier this year (where he was on the receiving end of a death stare from Taylor Swift).

He released this special hot off the heels of his 53rd birthday over the weekend, and having taped it in November in Brooklyn, found himself at times both nostalgic for how things used to be while also very grateful and joyful for where he’s at now.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a very coincidental thread that runs through both Koy’s new special and the other stand-up special that dropped this week from Marlon Wayans over on Prime Video, in that both of them take pains to remind their audiences to respect their mothers. Even though we’re closer to Father’s Day this month than Mother’s Day. Go figure.

Memorable Jokes: From a starting point of arguing that your followers on social media are not your friends, Koy argues that we need to get off of our phones to actually experience life. “They should call it antisocial media,” he says, describing younger generations as “they don’t hang out with anybody anymore.”

The phone also gives Koy a way into arguing how much life has changed in a couple of generations, describing how we used to have to take our selfies out to be developed and wait for the results, and how in his case, that led to his mom’s superstitious reasoning for “orbs” in some of the photos. “It was a dirty lens,” Koy recalls now. “But we put that picture on the altar for six months!”

He then uses the idea of generation gaps to demonstrate the stark difference between what his dad used to call “the hippity-hoppity” and what Koy himself now describes as “mumble-mumble,” bringing the joke home with help from a DJ, first playing a bit from Young Thug’s “Lifestyle,” before then breaking into “Hypnotize” by The Notorious B.I.G., at which point the entire audience at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn goes wild.

Koy does take more than a few minutes to poke fun at himself for getting older, noting how he not only has become lactose intolerant, but also found out he had sciatica only after watching how he walked onstage in his previous Netflix special. In his 50s, he notes he’s not perhaps at his most attractive either because he sleeps with a CPAP machine, and thanks to his sciatica diagnosis, also learned he apparently has no ass.

And his big closing act-out, describing the birth of his son, also makes Koy the butt of the joke, so to speak.

But in between, he has a lot of fun making fun of kids these days for having it easy when it comes to finding their first jobs as teenagers, and he finds one young fan in the crowd to dole out some vital advice for respecting his mom and checking his dad.

Our Take: None of the topics at the center of Koy’s setpieces are particularly novel, but he makes the most of out his takes on the premises no matter how many times you may have heard them from someone else.

Take the childbirth story, for example. Plenty of 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 makes hay and then some out of it, re-enacting the multiple times he lost consciousness, as well as his shrieks of horror, all while yelling at Caleb (the 12-year-old in the audience he singled out earlier) to picture his own mother giving birth to him, brings everyone in the theater to full attention.

Similarly, there’s a level of attention to detail Koy shows throughout the hour that not only plays to his strengths but puts them and him in his best light.

By taking note of specific audience members in the first couple of minutes, and by not mocking them but celebrating their reactions to his earliest 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 cramped quarters have forced generations of Americans to learn to live and laugh together, but by also building an inset stage putting him front and center in that crowd (somewhat akin to the Def Comedy Jam Biggie-era Brooklyn), he allows himself to feed off of their energy.

All of which makes him the opposite of the “Energy Vampires” he bemoans at the top of the hour.

The only weird moment is when he suggests the Brooklyn crowd should chastise those energy vampires outside in the parking lot after the show. Parking lot? Outside of Kings Theatre? Perhaps Koy didn’t have time to know. But now he knows.

Our Call: STREAM IT. This is a thoroughly enjoyable hour, that while it might not represent any sort of breakthrough or innovative new use of stand-up comedy, certainly does showcase Jo Koy at the height of his comedic powers.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.