Jo Koy Clarifies That His Taylor Swift Joke Was Not Meant to Offend: ‘I Have Great Respect for Her Work’

Jo Koy is clearing the air amid the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes opening monologue on Sunday night (Jan. 7), in which he made a quip towards Taylor Swift.

Koy’s joke at the awards ceremony centered around how often the NFL’s cameras cut to reaction shots of the singer when she attends boyfriend Travis Kelce’s games. “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift,” the comic joked as cameras, naturally, cut to Swift, who reacted with pursed lips before casually sipping from her champagne flute.

“I didn’t understand the Taylor tiff,” the comedian told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday (Jan. 11). “Mind you, that one was just getting rewritten 50 million times, never ran it through, all the way up until we had to walk out. It’s just weird, where do you place it, and we kept hammering it and cutting it down. But the whole intention of that joke was to make fun of the NFL.”

He continued, “It’s like, the cool thing about the Globes is we don’t need to do cutaways for ratings. What hurts the most is me just supporting Taylor, I support her, I love her work. I got nieces that I bought tickets for. There’s no ill intent in that joke. The joke is about the NFL and how they keep using cutaways to [her]. And it’s an obvious reason why. I’m not saying anything that no one’s saying, and it’s obvious what that joke was. It’s about the NFL.”

Koy concluded, “It’s like out of everything that has happened, this is the one you choose to go after. I didn’t understand why because it was fun when I walked out. Robert De Niro was dying, like, and I’m looking at him and his wife was smacking his back and smiling and laughing and he was laughing. And when I did the whole thing about him being 80, he loved it. And that was fun. I was like, man, this guy’s so much fun. And then I did that [Swift] joke and I’m like, what just happened?”

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