Cue the laughter! Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s return to the Golden Globes on Sunday, February 28, was packed with jokes, drinks and a few jabs — especially when it came to Emily in Paris.
The 2021 Golden Globes cohosts kicked off the night’s festivities with a monologue that managed to make viewers forget that the awards show was filmed amid the coronavirus pandemic — without an audience and mostly shot remotely.
“Emily in Paris is nominated for best TV series, musical or comedy, and I for one cannot wait to find out which it is,” Fey said while going through the night’s nominees. “’French exit’ is what I did after watching the first episode of Emily in Paris.”
The cameras then cut to the show’s star Lily Collins, who awkwardly smiled and laughed at the camera from a remote location.
The duo also poked fun at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which came under fire for its lack of diversity in its membership earlier this month.
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is made up of around 90 international no Black journalists that attend movie junkets each year, in search for a better life,” Fey said. “We say around 90 because a few might be ghosts and the German is just a sausage that someone drew a little face on.”
Poehler circled back to the HFPA later in the monologue joking, “Everybody is understandably upset with the HFPA and their choices. Look, a lot of flashy garbage got nominated, but that happens. That is their thing. But a number of Black actors and black-led projects were overlooked .”
“Look, we all know award shows are stupid,” Fey said before Poehler added, “They are all a scam, invented by big red carpet.”
Fey laughed, saying: “To sell more carpet.”
NBC Entertainment announced the comedy duo’s Golden Globes comeback in January 2020, with chairman Paul Teledgy telling Us Weekly in a statement, “NBC has long been the home to two of the funniest people on the planet — Tina Fey and Amy Poehler — and we didn’t want to wait any longer to share the great news that they’ll be hosting the Globes once again.”
The former Saturday Night Live costars previously ran the awards show from 2013 to 2015, making this year’s show their fourth joint hosting venture.
Ahead of their first hosting gig for Hollywood’s Party of the Year in 2013, Fey and Poehler joked about creating a drinking game to help viewers survive the night.
“Any time an actress cries in a speech, drink. Any time you see a person actively not listening to someone onstage, drink,” Fey said of the game’s rules during a January 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Poehler added: “[Drink] anytime someone says, ‘I didn’t prepare anything!”
The Parks and Recreation alum, who has known Fey since they were on the same improv team in Chicago in 1993, also opened up about why the pair are a good fit for this awards show and not the other more serious ones.
“We’ve fortunately been to a few of these awards show things now, and we’ve had some fun while we were there,” Poehler said. “And then the Golden Globes is just quirky and weird enough, I think that it’s up our alley.”
Before taking the stage in 2015, the 30 Rock alum told Us about her working relationship with Poehler, which has included SNL’s “Weekend Update,” Mean Girls, Baby Mama and Wine Country.
“I’m ready, I’m bringing it. Amy and I get along very well in that way,” Fey said in January 2015. “[We’re] easygoing and we are supportive of, ‘What have you got? OK, great. I’ll do this then.’ We work very well together in that way.”
