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Behind every great joke is a story. At least that was the case for comedian Jo Koy and his viral joke about attending a Los Angeles Dodgers game with his late stepfather, Sgt. Fred Harrison, a decorated Army veteran
who was battling cancer.
Koy sat down with Variety for an episode of “Anatomy of a Joke: Spotlight,” presented by Icon Live, where he explained how the bit came to life. In his Netflix stand-up special, “Jo Koy: Blue in the Face,” he recounts taking Harrison, a devoted Dodgers fan, to one of the team’s baseball games. But when the game stretched into extra innings, Koy began joking about his stepfather’s exhaustion, delivering the now-viral punchline: “He served two tours of Vietnam, and he’s going to die in a fucking Dodgers game!”
Rather than simply recounting what happened, Koy found himself recreating the mannerisms of his stepfather and the sounds of his oxygen tank, which had become familiar to him. At one point, Koy grabbed the microphone’s cord and held it up to his nose, mimicking the oxygen mask Harrison wore.
“I’m not going to just talk about Fred. I’m going to bring Fred to life, and you’re going to see exactly what I saw when I was a kid,” Koy told Variety. “You’re going to come into my world.”
When crafting a joke, Koy prefers letting the material unfold naturally. At one of his shows in his stepfather’s West Virginian hometown, the comedian recalled spending 30 minutes talking about Harrison and reliving memories they shared.
“I find when you write it [a joke] down, it starts to sound structured,” Koy explained. “When you do it on stage, it becomes more conversational.”
Koy shared he has long admired comedians who choose to act out an encounter and get into different characters. Seeing different personalities come to life on stage is something Koy fell in love with early in his career and incorporated into his own special, which debuted on Netflix in September.
“It’s not even a joke. It’s literally verbatim what happened that day,” Koy said about the viral moment. “It started off with me just telling everybody what happened that day and then inserting tiny jokes, I guess you could say.”
