Comic Jo Koy finds funny material right at home without going for usual targets

Jo Koy says that even before his comedy star began to rise, he could fill a venue the size of the South Point showroom with friends and relatives. Could and did.

Today you see the nice-guy comic on his own Comedy Central specials or on the roundtable of "Chelsea Lately." Ten years ago, Las Vegans might have seen him promoting his own showcases at the bygone Huntridge Theatre.

Koy, whose extended family still lives in Las Vegas, remembers his earliest paid gigs at Catch A Rising Star in the MGM Grand. "I noticed that like 50 percent of the people in the audience were my friends. I thought, 'Why am I giving these people the money when I can just go ahead and rent a theater and do the same thing for myself?' "

So he four-walled the Huntridge, booked comedians and went "door to door, to sell all my tickets to all my friends. I would sell that place out every time."

The 38-year-old Koy, who grew up in Seattle as Joseph Herbert, remembers he "wanted to be a comic when I was like 8 or 9. I knew I was going to be a comedian. It was in my blood."

His Filipino-American family moved to Las Vegas soon after he finished high school, to be near his ailing grandmother. Koy enrolled at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but the comedy bug bit hard enough to make him drop out once he started doing open-mic at a Maryland Parkway coffee shop.

His sister, Rowena Cook, was a steadily working singer in lounge bands such as Far East. "Even though she was the one making a ton of money singing and I'm doing coffee houses, she was so quick to brag about her little brother doing stand-up," he says. "No one's funnier than her brother, you know what I mean?"

This weekend, he rewards her loyalty by featuring her as the opening act for his shows at South Point, the second time he has performed there as a ticketed headliner.

Koy moved to Los Angeles about five years ago and says everything changed after he got on "The Tonight Show." That was seen by Carlos Mencia, who took him out on an arena tour. And that was seen by the Comedy Central brass, who gave him a half-hour special and then a full hour not a year later.

"I always had the presentation, my onstage persona, but my voice really kicked in right around my 10th year," he says. "That's when I realized I didn't have to write anymore. I knew I could just walk up and talk about anything and it would just come out right, as if it were written."

Part of his focus came from the birth of his now 6-year-old son, who has supplied material for many of Koy's most popular routines. Once Koy began describing those antics -- even letting the lad explain in a YouTube video why he colored his "ting-ting" green -- "I realized it was more personal, it was more about me.

"It wasn't about being some jokey-joke guy talking about what's in the newspaper. You can't steal that from anybody. My son really does this stuff, and I talk about it."

Fans can rest assured Little Jo will be there this weekend. "He's a ham. He loves to stand outside while I sell merchandise," he says.

But Koy sounds a bit wistful when he says, "He just keeps getting older and older and it makes me sad. I want my baby back."

It's not surprising to hear such a confession from a stand-up who ironically titles his DVD, "Don't Make Him Angry." Koy's good fortunes may be in part due to tapping into the Judd Apatow-era of finding the joke without denigrating the usual targets: spouses, authority figures and the like.

"I never enjoyed watching that," he says. "My inspirations were Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal. They were happy, they had big smiles on their faces, there was energy. That's what I pride myself on. I don't go to a comedy club to hear miserable (stuff) in a funny way.

"No one's getting hurt," Koy says of comedy that's clean beyond casual profanity. "You can't get mad at me because look at what I just said about myself."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.