Well yeah. Of course there wasn’t enough of them, either of them. And of course, Tina Fey’s first dress made me want to dig through their castoff pile to see what she should have worn instead, although I liked Amy in Clinton Blue on the red carpet. (Lainey: I did not.)
The thing with these two is they knew they were out after this year, so they had to accomplish specific things. I’d say last year was the high water mark – hell, I’d say the Gravity joke about Clooney was the high water mark of their entire Globes tenure.
So they don’t want to try so hard this year to be better and look sweaty. Plus George changed the whole game on them. So they decided to change the game too. Instead of quantity, they aimed for jokes that would land. They had the North Korea bit, and it wasn’t so much funny for its concept as it was Tina and Amy pointing out that you can do an entire political spoof without sixteen men onstage.
And then… they went ALL IN on the Cosby joke. It wasn’t an aside that, by the time you caught it, they had already moved on. It was a bit. They did it, they said in so many words that he “put the pills in the people”, and even though there were cutaways of the audience with expressions on their faces that basically said “Are we allowed to laugh?!?”, Amy and Tina don’t care because they didn’t waste their last at-bat. They left it all on the floor.
Amy clearly won the first outfit-off, in that purple sheath thing that didn’t need the blue necklace but Tina Fey’s hot-as-f*ck tux took the second round with her hand all casual in her pocket, especially – crucially – because the pants were hemmed short enough. I’m going to freeze my ass off wearing ankle pants tomorrow.
(Lainey: here’s the only cutaway they showed during the Cosby joke. In the video below, the joke comes at the 8:50 mark. And the reaction shot is shortly after. Clooney LOVES it. Emily Blunt is adorably uncomfortable. JLO eyes go sideways. And Meryl, ever the professional, ducks her head. We could do an entire class on this at the Faculty of Celebrity Studies.)
