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!”
“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.”
“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.”
