Greta Gerwig could’ve roasted Jo Koy’s tactless swipe at Barbie from the Golden Globes during her recent appearance on BBC Radio 4. Instead, the director seems to have kept things very diplomatic.
Globes viewers and critics were not thrilled with Koy’s monologue on Sunday night, in which the host managed to piss off Taylor Swift, blame his writers for jokes that bombed, and drop a sexist joke about the biggest blockbuster of the year—all while scolding the crowd for not laughing enough.
The Barbie joke in question: “Oppenheimer and Barbie are competing for cinematic box office achievements,” Koy said. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is based on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
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Speaking with BBC Radio 4 (via Deadline), Gerwig said, “Well, he’s not wrong. She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on. And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll… Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story. She’s there to be projected upon.”
Gerwig noted that Barbie creator Ruth Handler drew her inspiration from watching her daughter play with dolls and realizing, “My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman.’”
Since the doll’s release in 1959, Gerwig said, Barbie has 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.”
There is an argument to be made (and yours truly has made it) that Barbie ignores the full story of the doll’s origins to its detriment, but Koy’s dismissive joke missed the mark. He’s since gone on an apology tour to smooth things over with Swifties and Globes viewers everywhere.
Gerwig, meanwhile, has clearly taken it all in stride. Speaking with BBC Radio 4 about being the first director to accept the Globes’ cinematic and box office achievement award, she said, “It was very wonderful and emotional to be able to take to the stage with the groups that made it.” She added that it “felt very fitting… for all of us, the thing that we wanted most of all was to connect with people and to have people share an experience in the cinemas, in the movie theaters.”
