On April 3^rd, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a stand-up DVD called Lights Out, featuring Filipino stand-up comic Jo Koy.  It’s Koy’s second stand-up special DVD after Don’t Make Him Angry, which came out three years ago, in 2009.  At that time, I predicted that Jo Koy would not be remembered very long, and would be off our radar by 2011.  I was clearly wrong.

     I said that then because I didn’t like Don’t Make Him Angry.  It was all ethnic jokes about being Filipino, and lame attempts at edginess with reference to his kid.  Lights Out is a lot of the same stuff, but it IS (marginally) better.  This time, he riffs on his mother a lot, and some of the edgy stuff is good in that he no longer seems to be trying too hard.  His bit about his mom grabbing his wiener when he was a kid feels real, and a bit about her standing at the foot of his bed monitoring his sleep patterns is very funny.

     I’m still not a big Jo Koy fan.  The really funny bits in this particular routine were few and far between.  And I still find him more tepid than terrific.  But Lights Out is better than Don’t Make Him Angry, so I feel like three years from NOW, I might actually find that Jo Koy has become decent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 6:21 am and is filed under 2011, Comedy, Stand-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.