When comedian Roy Wood Jr.left his job as a correspondent on The Daily Show in 2023, he didn't have any immediate plans for what would come next — then he sold three TV scripts, a book and an hour-long special.
"And, then, somewhere in the middle of all of that, CNN happened," Wood says of his comedy show, Have I Got News for You. Based on a British series of the same name, the CNN show features Wood quizzing celebrities about current events.
For Wood, CNN seemed like a natural place to extend his comedy. "Daily Show taught me over-analysis and how to find the angle on a topic that no one has touched yet," he says. "And then [Daily Show host] Trevor Noah taught me through observation, as a Black man, when to use your anger and when to keep it in your back pocket, performatively."
In his new Hulu special, Lonely Flowers, Wood riffs on how isolation has sent society spiraling into a culture of guns, protests, rude employees, self-checkout lanes and sex parties. If it seems like an odd assortment of topics for a comedy special, that's intentional.
"When I did BET's Comic View in 2004, I'd gotten turned down three years in a row, and I got so angry with them that ... I watched every episode and I cataloged every topic that was breached by comedians for the [previous year's] entire season," he says. "Here's how many jokes about [being] ugly. Here's sex jokes. Here's race jokes, president, famous people ... and cataloged it all and then just told myself that entire year, I won't make a joke about any of these things. So now, at minimum, I'm original."
Interview highlights
On leaving The Daily Show in the year after Trevor Noah left as host
It goes back to the Doug Herzog quote that I posted the day I left where I said, "You don't own these jobs. You rent them. And sooner or later your number's up." So it doesn't matter if I stayed at The Daily Show, sooner or later, an exit is inevitable. It's which uncertainty will you choose? Stay at this job, not sure who's going to get hired [as host]. Or the uncertainty of not having a job and trying to create another job. And maybe it'll be even better job. Choose!
On how getting arrested led to him pursuing stand-up
My father never paid federal taxes, so when he died, they came for everything. And I remember that very well. I remember working 30 hours a week in high school to help with the bills, because I don't want my mom picking up another job. ...
So '98, I get arrested for stealing some credit cards and buying stuff and selling clothing on campus or whatever. And so in that time, I get suspended from school. … So during that time I start doing stand-up because I think I might go to prison. … I took a Greyhound up to Birmingham and performed and went back to the bus station, slept there because I didn't want my mom to know I was in town. ... She knew about the arrest. That's why she didn't want me doing comedy. "You need to be somewhere with a job looking gainfully employed so they don't send you to prison." To which I said, "Thanks, Joyce. I think I'm going to sleep in bus stations. This activity makes me happy and I just want to be happy right now." And that's all it was. And I ended up getting probation.
On his dad working in news and being a founding investor in Soul Train
My dad was the first Black announcer at pretty much most stations he worked at in the 1950s and '60s, doing news for the most part. And so he got with some people up in Chicago and decided to create the National Black Network. And the National Black Network was a series of syndicated news stories and articles and programs that would be sent out to Black radio stations across the country. ... And my dad gets pulled over by a cop, and the cop has a really deep voice. … He's in the middle of getting a ticket. And my dad goes, "Yeah, man. You have a nice voice. ... You should be on the radio. You should be out here doing this." And my dad gave the cop his card.
And the cop he gave the card to was Don Cornelius, Officer Don Cornelius, for the Chicago Police Department. He'd only been on the force a year. He quit. Started working at WVON as a reporter, got an itch for media, eventually came up with the brainchild for a show, like Dick Clark's American Bandstand and he goes to my father and goes, "Hey, man, I'm taking up money. If you want to be an investor in this show." My pops gave Don Cornelius some of the money to shoot the pilot for Soul Train. … My dad gave maybe like, let's just say $1,000, which is a good jillion billion dollars in 1986. …
And [once the show started] my dad goes, Hey, Don, I need that money, man," and Don goes, "Instead of giving your money back. Why don't I just keep you on as a producer? You can be an executive producer the rest of your life." To which my dad said, "Nobody wants to watch Black people dance. Give me my money." Don paid him back. My father took the money, signed away his rights to any claims of the Soul Train empire. And that was that.
On his philosophy of using the n-word and curse words in jokes
I try to use it in scenarios if I'm impersonating the person who would have said it, or if it is a feeling of exasperation. … So I'm not going to say "frickin" or "gosh darn," that just for me, does not work. I have resigned myself to the truth, though, that certain words are going to nail to chalkboard certain people because they just don't like those words. And if that's the case, then I'm not sure if everything that I do is going to be for you. And that's fine when done properly. A comedy booker told me ages ago — this was late '90s — she said, "Profanity should be the seasoning never the main ingredient." So I curse way more when I'm first starting a joke and a lot of that is just nervousness and curse words become um words. Like you saw me in a comedy club working new material versus when it's polished, it's night and day. And so you have all of these curse words and there is scaffolding, and then you slowly start taking the support beams away to see whether or not the joke is really funny.
On the importance of staying grounded
You have to know what regular people are going through. And you can't do that by just living in Uber Blacks your entire life. I consider comedy to be a form of journalism, living anthropology, in its highest form. You do anthropology on things that are still alive, things that are still evolving, so you have to be immersed in that. You have to be yourself in that a little bit. So, yeah, take the train. Talk to regular people. That's the one thing I always loved about The Daily Show was that conversation with people. It's the thing I miss the most about morning radio more than anything, it's just talking to strangers. Every day I got to talk to anywhere from eight to 10 regular people just going on about their life and you understand their concerns and what they're going through. And then that becomes the things that I can take and put on stage, because now you have an opportunity, in a way, to be a voice of connection.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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