Comedy Fans Say The Golden Globes Stand-Up Nominations Are A List of the "Worst Comedians in the World"

Ideally, the nominations for one of the most prestigious awards in comedy shouldn’t read like a bad joke to actual comedy fans.

While all of the artistic mediums honored at the Golden Globes suffer from a high degree of subjectivity on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, comedy is one of those genres that the voters never seem to know how to handle. Hell, for the last 73 ceremonies and counting, the Golden Globes has given out one of the more head-scratching hybrid honors, Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, in all of Hollywood.

Nevertheless, the HFPA should probably consider it a big swing-and-a-miss when they announce a field of candidates for the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television award and the internet immediately starts roasting the list like it’s Bill Maher fresh off his dinner at the White House.

With respect to Brett Goldstein, Kumail Nanjiani, Sarah Silverman and nobody else, if every single Golden Globes voter simply picked the names they recognized out of the list of stand-up specials that came out this year without actually watching any one of them, they'd probably end up with the exact same nominations as the ones we have now. 

Meanwhile, the HFPA declined to nominate a single comedian under the age of 45, further suggesting that the selection process for the Golden Globes' stand-up comedy category unfairly favored the most entrenched, established and hosted-the-Golden-Globes-multiple-times comedians at the expense of finding the very funniest hour of the year. Names that furious comedy fans brought up as snubs in this Gen-X-and-above familiarity contest included Jerrod Carmichael for his special Don't Be Gay, Gianmarco Soresi for Thief of Joy and Caleb “More Influential Than MrBeast” Hearon for Model Comedian.

However, considering how this will only be the third-ever Golden Globe Award for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television in the history of the ceremony, perhaps we should be grading the HFPA on a curve based on how new they are to evaluating stand-up. And, since the awards ceremony just added podcasting to its categories, they should be able to catch up on the state of modern stand-up pretty quickly.