Comic Jo Koy tells Jalen Rose how he made his dreams come true.
There’s one thing people need to know about comedian Jo Koy: If you turn him away, he will find his way in through a side door. In fact, Jo has made a career of getting people to say yes using his charm, resourcefulness and perseverance.
For example, about 26 years ago, Jo landed a spot on BET’s “ComicView” by walking up to the security guard with a fake headshot and résumé.
“It was all fake. I didn’t open for anybody on that résumé. It was all full of s–t,” he told me on this week’s “Renaissance Man” episode. He fed the security guard a line that he was a local comic and said, “A lot of people like me. If you don’t mind, I’d like to open up, if you could just talk to the promoter.”
Instead of telling him to get lost, the security guard went and got the promoter.
“I’ll give a big shout-out to Yvette Anderson. She was promoting all these BET shows and she came up to the front door and I handed her my résumé and I said, ‘I’m a local comic. Can I just do like five minutes of warmup?'” She said the talent was already booked, but she offered him a ticket near the stage and said she’d look over his résumé.
“Don’t get mad when I do this — it was a black show. Every comic was late. Even the host,” he told me, which made me laugh even more.
“We’re at 2022 now and this is the first film ever by a major studio, Universal, DreamWorks and Amblin, that’s putting an all-Asian cast on the big screen. It’s just mind-blowing that my mom has lived in this country for 51 years and this is her first time actually seeing her culture being represented on the big screen.”
It’s amazing to think that he almost gave up on comedy. A few years ago, he was hoping to land a Netflix special but was given a big fat no.
“I didn’t understand, because I was crushing everywhere. And I’m to the point where I kept calling them and they were not showing up. And then finally they just said, ‘We don’t want it. We’re going to pass’ … So we shot it ourselves.
“I paid for the whole thing. We paid for it. We shot it. We rented out the theater, we sold the tickets for it and we cut it. And by the way … two days before we shot that special, [Netflix] called up my manager and they said, ‘Hey, we heard Jo Koy is shooting a special. We just want you to know — we really don’t want it.'”
After it was filmed, Jo started shopping it around, but Netflix called right away.