ALBANY — Well into his nearly two-hour show at the Palace Theatre on Friday night, comedian Jo Koy confessed to the soldout crowd, “I’m freestyling here,” meaning he was riffing on interactions with the audience and otherwise making up much of it as he went along.
“I’m trying to think of (jokes) because I just dropped my Netflix special six months ago … (and) you know all the punchlines,” he added.
Jo Koy
With Joey Guila
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Palace Theatre, 19 Clintoin Ave., Albany
Length: Koy, 110 minutes; Guila, 20 minutes
The crowd: Sold out at 2,800
While admirable in principle to try to give a live audience fresh material, the practical result was this: The Netflix special was 74 minutes of honed jokes and stories, and it’s included in a $15-a-month subscription, but those at the Palace on Friday, some of whom no doubt bought tickets because of that special, paid an average of $60 for an overlong, meandering, unfocused performance. A large portion of the 110-minute set felt like frequent mediocre freestyling and crowd work poorly balanced with older routines. After 34 years of performing stand-up, Koy is too professional to utterly flop, but he returned to some references so often, particularly the effects of sciatica, that they were less callbacks to earlier jokes than tedious, frequent repetition.
The last time Koy was in the Capital Region, a year and a half ago, he was dating fellow comic Chelsea Handler, and the pair professed their love for the capital city in a series of posts on Instagram. On Friday, in contrast, now dumped by Handler, Koy started the evening by insulting his host city and complaining about the allegedly freezing temperature. When a woman in the audience shouted, “It’s 40 degrees outside,” the comedian became aggressive, saying, “Don’t talk to me. … Is your name on the ticket? (People are)…
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