Jo Koy Albany Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Jo Koy in Albany — FAQ

About Jo Koy

Joseph Glenn Herbert was born June 2, 1971 in Tacoma, Washington, the son of a Filipino mother who emigrated from the Philippines and an American father who served in the Air Force. The family moved around military postings before settling in Spokane, Washington and then Las Vegas, Nevada, where Jo Koy attended high school and started running open-mic nights as a teenager. The stage name 'Jo Koy' came directly from his aunt, who used it as a household nickname; he kept it because it landed cleaner than the long Filipino-American mouthful of his given name. The early club years ran through the Las Vegas Strip lounges and the Los Angeles circuit — Carolines on Broadway in New York and the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood gave him the late-1990s and early-2000s grind that built the act. A regular slot on Chelsea Handler's Chelsea Lately panel through the late 2000s and early 2010s put him in front of a mainstream cable audience for the first time, and the Netflix era then compounded the audience: Jo Koy: Live from Seattle taped at the Moore Theatre in 2017, Jo Koy: Comin' In Hot taped in Honolulu in 2019, Jo Koy: In His Elements taped in Manila in 2020 alongside a slate of Filipino performers, and Jo Koy: Live from the Las Vegas Strip taped at the Mirage in 2024 to mark his Vegas residency. The Mirage residency itself, anchored at the casino's Aces of Comedy room, ran in extended weekend stands and became, for a stretch, the most consistent Strip comedy booking by a Filipino-American headliner. In 2022 he wrote, produced, and starred in Easter Sunday, the Universal feature film built around a Filipino-American family gathering — the first major studio comedy to put a Filipino-American family at the center of the story. In January 2024 he hosted the Golden Globe Awards, only the second stand-up to host the ceremony in that era. The arena tour has scaled in lockstep: the Funny Is Funny World Tour and prior cycles routinely sell out 12,000-to-18,000-seat rooms across the United States, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, and the Filipino-American diaspora turns out in a density that few other touring acts can match.

Related