[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now for a few minutes, a very special guest, Roy Wood Jr., correspondent for The Daily Show, and who gave such a funny but also meaningful keynote at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month with some unforgettable lines like this.

Roy Wood Jr.: The untouchable Tucker Carlson is out of a job. Okay. Some people celebrate it, but the Tucker staff, I want you to know that I know what you're feeling. I work at The Daily Show, so I too, have been blindsided by the sudden departure of the host of a fake news program.

Brian Lehrer: Roy Wood at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We've got one more to play from that, but more importantly, Roy Wood Jr. joins us now live. Roy, we're honored. Welcome to WNYC today.

Roy Wood Jr.: Thank you. Thank you for having me. As you can hear, my voice is just now finally leaving me after a month of chaos.

Brian Lehrer: What chaos? You mean after the Correspondents' Dinner?

Roy Wood Jr.: Well, even leading up to it. The thing that was interesting was that myself and my writers, when we were working on the set, I was out until about three o'clock in the morning every night. While I was up, I was out until 1:00 AM running the set, up until 3:00 AM making changes to the document. Sleep, get up in the morning, do fatherhood, do Daily Show, and then at like 8:00 PM, be right back out. The thing I was most nervous about with the Correspondents' Dinner was losing my voice leading up to it, but thankfully didn't lose it till after.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, great. You lost it for us. Thanks a lot.

[laughter] Did it turn out, Roy, that everyone could take a joke? It was supposedly President Obama's joke about Trump one year that Trump couldn't stand being a laugh line in that contributed to him actually running for president, running for president out of spite for a joke. Do you think you touched any nerves like that at the dinner?

Roy Wood Jr.: No, I don't think so. Ron DeSantis wasn't there, so we didn't make the same eye contact that Obama and Trump made. I know Seth Meyers is probably an accessory to the crime, too, they say. No, I went into this really wanting to more attack issues. My thing about people is that people change, issues remain the same. You have to be very careful about singling out just a person just because. Because even if you get them out of office, there's going to be a new person in. That's the thing that people talk about with Tucker Carlson is that, Tucker Carlson replaced Bill O'Reilly. Whatever you get on the other side of Tucker Carlson, it's not going to be Anderson Cooper. We have to be very careful and look at the issue, the bigger issue, which is media organizations that allow their talent to do what O'Reilly and Tucker did.

Brian Lehrer: How do you see the place of The Daily Show in American comedy or politics today? It's been through very two consequential runs now with Jon Stewart and then Trevor Noah as host and with Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden as presidents. How do you see the role of the show, ideally in our culture today?

Roy Wood Jr.: I think the role of the show remains the same, which is to shine a light on BS that's going on and hopefully get people to chuckle a couple of times about it before crying into their pillows at 11:30. I think the bigger issue is looking at the different ways that people get news and watching the show evolve into that.

Under Trevor, the thing that was most interesting and I think a lot of people don't notice this at first glance, we did a lot more sketches than were ever done under Jon. I would argue that Jon Stewart's tenure there were maybe 10 or 11 SNL-style sketches, not a field piece, but just a legit scripted segment.

We did those on a regular under Trevor, and a lot of that comes from the fact that sketch comedy is a lot more commonplace. It's not just SNL. SNL was the best at it but Instagram and TikTok are littered with people doing all types of funny sketches. That being a visual medium of understanding something political was something that Trevor saw and Trevor ran towards. I think the more interesting question for me going into this next iteration of The Daily Show and looking at it, and if I'm a part of it, is seeing how the delivery vehicle of satire evolves.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask, for our radio audience about your parents? I say for our radio audience because I know your father, Roy Wood Sr. actually founded an important radio network. The other clip I want to play from the White House Correspondents' Dinner is when you get off the laugh lines for a minute and talk about your mother and the importance of local journalism to her historic contribution to our country. I'm going to play that right now for everybody to hear.

Roy Wood Jr.: My mother was amongst a group of Black student protesters fighting for equality in the '60s at Delta State University.

[applause]

That was a dangerous time, but those types of incidents were covered by local reporters. Some of the shame that came from the national embarrassment of treating people inhumanely is part of the pressure that helped to create that type of change. What would have become of my mother and those other protesters if a local journalist wasn't there telling the story?

Brian Lehrer: You grew up with a college activist mother who then had a career in higher education and a father engaged in the serious business of starting the first national Black-oriented radio network, and you came out a comedian. How did that happen?

Roy Wood Jr.: [chuckles] I do not know. The irony is that I wanted to be a sports journalist. Stuart Scott was my north star in terms of career trajectory. Then somehow along the way, I've always enjoyed making people laugh. I remember in high school when I was a benchwarmer for the baseball team, my job was to write heckles that we would yell at the other team during the game. I took pride in it and the only thing I wanted was to make the umpire laugh. If you make a baseball umpire crack and call time out in the middle of a game because you are funny, that is a standing ovation to me.

That drug of the power of controlling people, the manipulation of it with comedy, I can make you feel better. I don't know what you're going through right now, but watch this, I'm going to make you feel different, the feeling never left.

Once I got older into my 30s, that's when the political angle activated. Most of my comedy early on if you go back and look at most of my stuff in the early aughts, it's lighter fare. It's funny, but it's light. It's not police reform. It's not the prison industrial complex. No topic that I did in my first three-hour specials could you find in any of my late-night sets from Star Search and Comedy Central Premium Blend and just it's not there.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we did a segment around Mother's Day called When did You First Realize You Were Becoming Your Mother? That was a lighthearted segment, but it sounds like you gradually became your parents in a very serious way.

Roy Wood Jr.: Yes. I really attribute part of that to also having a child myself and becoming a parent, you become much more keenly aware of the world around you and what is actually happening outside, and what type of world are we leaving and what can I do to try and be a part to change that or educate people.

I'm probably never going to be like my mother and protesting to the point of arrest in front of a-- what I can do is bring a camera and talk to the people who are there so that their story is told on a much larger scale. I do think that that is as important. Reporting on what is happening is as important as what's happening.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, and I hope you get your voice back in time, I see you'll be on tour this summer, including here in New York at City Winery on Saturday, June 17th. Maybe your last answer is the answer to this question but what kind of material can people expect?

Roy Wood Jr.: Well, on the road we're getting into Donald Trump a little bit, a little bit of DeSantis. I get to expand a little bit on some of what I said at the Correspondents' Dinner. Sidebar with this Giuliani news coming out, is Donald Trump the most snitched on person in the history of snitching? Is there a single friend in his camp? Anybody? I don't think so.

City Winery is a little different. We do a show called Tribulations. I team with a wonderful licensed therapist, a Black woman named Bea Arthur. Bea and I take- the audience members anonymously send up to the stage issues that they're going through.

Me and some comedians give terrible advice and then Bea comes on stage and cleans it up with something professional. It's a beautiful, beautiful night of bonding. It's like anonymous group therapy in comedy. It's probably the only way I can describe it, but that's what we'll be doing at City Winery. I'll do a proper New York show sometime in October, November. We're still working out the paperwork.

Brian Lehrer: Roy Wood, Jr. Thank you so much. Thank you for not canceling because of your voice, as many lesser guests would have. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Roy Wood Jr.: No. We're good in the lower octaves. It's just when I try to get up here to perform, then we're in trouble.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.