If the Hollywood Foreign Press Association ever hoped that Tuesday night’s Golden Globe Awards could be back to business as usual, they picked the wrong guy to host.

But for a needed shot of straight talk, they picked the right guy.

A year after turning the Globes into a private event because NBC declined to telecast it and stars declined to show up, and six months after a reorganization that doubled the number of voters, made marginal improvements in the number of Black members (it’s now more than zero) and turned them from a nonprofit organization to a privately owned, for-profit one, the HFPA returned to a Beverly Hilton ballroom that only superficially resembled the place where they used to hold the Globes.

And the host, comic actor Jerrod Carmichael, pulled the rug out from under them with a somber opening monologue in which he suggested he was...