“I accept this award on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere,” said Hugh Laurie in accepting his Golden Globe for “The Night Manager” Sunday night. The room reacted tepidly. Could it be that even Hollywood is getting tired of Trump jokes?
Host Jimmy Fallon, derided as the Goebbels of late night comedy ever since he treated Donald Trump in the same friendly-goofy manner he treats everyone else, was determined to make good with the hysteria-bots of the showbiz-media complex.
So he came out looking to score some coolness points, striking out with the line, “This is the Golden Globes, one of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote.”
How’s that, James? Far from opening its balloting to the public, the Golden Globes’ organizers at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are a secretive, strictly limited club with 85 members. They’re about as open and democratic as the Bilderberg Group.
Fallon also came up with a joke comparing Trump to Joffrey on “Game of Thrones.” Of all the TV and movie characters to joke about, he compared Trump to a kid king? Say what you will about the president-elect, but at 70 he can hardly be accused of being too young.
Routine after routine went the way of Fallon’s malfunctioning Teleprompter. The only entertaining interludes were the Adele Dazeem moments, like when Sofia Vergara said “The Hollywood Foreign Press has an anal tradition…I didn’t mean anal!” And Goldie Hawn said, “Best actor in a comedy or mystical,” leaving the audience uncertain whether she was being funny or just being 71.
Otherwise, the evening was about as dynamic as the New York Giants’ offense.
Presenters had to keep shushing the bored crowd as onlookers chatted freely during the introductions. It’s hard to say whether the air of Sleepytime Tea that substituted for the blokey, beery hostility that Ricky Gervais brought the Globes a few years ago was due to feeble execution or sheer predictability.
Laurie embodied both as he devoted most of his speech to anti-Trump barbs like, “I’ll be able to say I won this at the last ever Golden Globes. I don’t mean to be gloomy, it’s just that it has the words ‘Hollywood,’ ‘Foreign,’ and ‘Press’ in the title. I also think to some Republicans even the word ‘association’ is sketchy.” Hugh has only been working in this country for 20 years. He hasn’t heard of the National Rifle Association yet.
Even more bizarrely, Meryl Streep, accepting a lifetime achievement award, virtually repeated Laurie’s joke, then mournfully called out the names of foreign-born actors and said, “If we kick em all out we’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed-martial arts. Which are not the arts!”
This is what it’s like to view the world through Hollyweird glasses: You actually worry that President Trump is going to deport Amy Adams and Natalie Portman.