Greta Gerwig co-signs Jo Koy’s ‘sexist’ joke about Barbie and her ‘big boobies’: ‘He was right on’
Life in plastic is back to being fantastic.
“Barbie” director Greta Gerwig said Wednesday that she agrees with Jo Koy‘s joke that her box office hit was based “on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
The joke came during Koy’s opening monologue for Sunday’s award ceremony, where he stated that: “‘Oppenheimer’ is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and ‘Barbie’ is on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
Despite being slammed on social media by one netizen who called the joke “sexist,” Gerwig admitted that Koy, 52, had a point.
“Well, he’s not wrong,” Gerwig, 40, laughed while chatting with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program. “She’s the first doll that was mass-produced with breasts, so he was right on.”
“Barbie, by her very construction, has no character, no story; she’s there to be projected upon,” she continued. “And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll.”
The “Lady Bird” director also praised Ruth Handler, the creator of the first Barbie, for her insight in making the doll a clean slate for girls to project themselves onto.
“The insight that Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls is she realized, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman.’ “
According to Gerwig, the popular Mattel doll has played many roles since coming out in 1959.
“She’s been a villain, and she’s been a hero,” said Gerwig, who added that “Barbie has always been sometimes ahead of culture, sometimes behind culture, and she’s always been a flashpoint for arguments.”
“There’s never been a time when I wasn’t familiar with both the desire that Barbie inspired and all the arguments against Barbie,” she said.
The film, which grossed nearly $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office, was nominated for nine Golden Globes and later won the brand-new cinematic and box office achievement award as well as snagging best original song for Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”
According to the director, winning the award felt like a “full-circle moment.”
“It felt very fitting because I think all of us the thing that that we wanted most of all, was to connect with people and to have people share an experience in the cinemas and movie theaters,” said Gerwig. “And it felt like, even though this is a brand-new award, it felt like it was the award to honor that and that was always what we had wanted to do.”
“So it was very full circle,” she added. “It was nice to be able to hear Margot [Robbie] say ‘this is for everybody who came.’ ”
Gerwig’s masterpiece, which held the world in its pink iron grip for several months, also came under fire from several critics for being too woke.
“It’s what’s sort of amazing about it is it inspired such a wide range of reactions,” Gerwig told the BBC. “But those are always my favorite things. It’s like OK, well, let’s talk about it. Let’s discuss it.”
