For some, Roy Wood Jr. might be most famous for being one of the guys who didn’t get the full-time host job after Trevor Noah abruptly left The Daily Show in 2022. And while that’s a topic he doesn’t shy away from, the classification dramatically undermines the eclectic career the Alabama native has built. He performs subversively sensitive stand-up, showcased in his fourth stand-up special, Hulu’s Lonely Flowers, as well as hosts (CNN’s Have I Got News for You), acts (Sundance entry Love, Brooklyn) and has followed in the footsteps of his late father, the journalist and civil rights activist Roy Wood Sr., with the lauded NPR podcast Road to Rickwood. Zooming from Manhattan in early January, the 46-year-old dad was eager to talk about all of it, along with the frequently ignored line between comedy and journalism and the future of late night: “Ain’t going to be no more $20 million-a-season white men at 11:30.”
You got a bit of attention for turning down shots from Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on their New Year’s Eve telecast. Was that your plan?
It wasn’t a premeditated joke, but I have only been on CNN for 10 episodes. I have not earned the right to just get shit-faced with Anderson and Andy. And me taking a shot of liquor will be the picture they use when something bad happens in my career. I’m not giving you that ammo. That joke was in defense of Don Lemon, by the way. I feel like most people took it as such, but I don’t know.
You once told Marc Maron that, because you have a round face, people can never accept you being angry onstage. How did you come to that conclusion?
Most Black male entertainers do not get the luxury of anger as a performance. Paul Mooney probably did it best, but he bathed in it. Dick Gregory was scathing, but his jokes served as a kind of release. Patrice O’Neal did a wonderful job of being annoyed. But a Black male rant-style comedian, some Lewis Black type shit? I don’t know if that exists on the Black side of comedy. Couple that with a round face and it just doesn’t work.
But what’s wrong with round faces?
In the original version of that show Brain Games, on National Geographic, they broke down how the brain reacts to things — different colors, body language, all of that. I studied that when I got to The Daily Show, because I was trying to find comedic cheats within my act to help me do better on camera. And there’s something about circles and being rotund, even if you’re just rotund in the face, where you’re received like a teddy bear. If I ever was angry, properly angry, most people would go, “Oh, I wish he felt better,” instead of listening to what I had to say. So I can be cranky, not angry. I can’t get any angrier onstage than Carl Winslow would be with Steve Urkel.
Do you wish you had more leeway with that?
Once you identify how you’re perceived, you have to allow that to inform your material — or at least how you present it to the audience. What I discovered on The Daily Show was that I could be furious about things — as long as nobody else was furious about them. I did rants about food or car commercials. For anything nonsensical, I could go 1990s Dennis Leary on that shit. It’s funny, because I really am mad about those things, but it’s not abortion or gun control. There are no stakes.
Have I Got News for You is very different from The Daily Show, in terms of format and workload, but it is still entrenched in current events. You signed up for this before the 2024 election. What is your appetite for the news now that you’re covering another Trump presidency?
A lot of where political satire goes under Trump is defined by the efficiency or inefficiency of his administration. But the government doesn’t get to skirt accountability and we don’t stop making jokes just because everybody’s tired of the material. I’m tired of it, too. I wish there was something else to hold accountable other than Trump, but that’s who’s in charge. I do think, over the next four years, there’s going to have to be an evolution within political satire that is not simply calling the president stupid. We know that. What else you got?
With CNN, we have the least amount of accountability [on the network]. Our job is to simply inform you humorously about what happened the last seven days. I don’t have the same responsibility that I did at The Daily Show to get into the causation of a problem. If we drive past that and mention it on the way to a joke, cool, but I’m not John Oliver. I don’t have the burden of zooming in on a granular level and show you how a law that was passed in the 1950s has poisoned all of agriculture today.
John Oliver very adamantly says what he does is not journalism. You studied journalism. Your father was a journalist. Where do you think that kind of political comedy falls?
I think that what I do is adjacent to journalism, for sure. It would be arrogant to call myself a journalist when I think about the level of research and attention that is required. But if people are gaining information from what you’re saying in between the laughs, then that’s something worth acknowledging. All these people say that they’re not journalists. All these shows say that they’re not journalistic, but all them shows got fact checkers. We’ve got a fact checker on CNN. That alone puts you ahead of the curve of some podcast with a bunch of idiots on a couch yelling into a microphone with neon lights behind them. I believe stand-up comedy is a form of journalism. You’re either reporting on what you see or you are reporting on what’s within your heart. That doesn’t mean it’s all factually accurate, but it is a form of disseminating information to people.
Well, that’s why the journalism label gets thrown around so often. Because a significant percentage of the population get their news through comedy outlets.
The reason comedians don’t want to be called journalists is that we want to be beholden to the code of conduct of a comedian, not a journalist. A comedian gets to be a little bit more free-handed and color outside the lines. And the moment you start trying to put on a journalism hat and say that what you’re doing is essential work, then you are allowing yourself to be checked as a journalist and not an entertainer. The boundary of entertainment is a lot more loosey-goosey. It’s Jell-O. The boundaries for journalism are concrete.
That’s the situation that Hasan Minhaj found himself in with that New Yorker piece that poked a lot of holes into the accuracy of some his stand-up anecdotes.
That’s a great example. What happened with Hasan was very much one of those scenarios where someone that people held to the standards of journalism did comedy that did not match up to the standards of journalism. So are you good comedian or are you bad journalist? That was the debate. And keep in mind, Hasan never called himself a journalist. He was about facts, for sure, but wasn’t doing TED Talks. Any comedian that wants to proudly wear the title of journalist, you’re juggling dynamite.
You and I met at the Governors Ball after the Emmys where you mouthed something on camera while your fellow writers and correspondents from The Daily Show, which you’d left at that point, accepted the award for outstanding talk series. You clarified that you were saying Comedy Central needed to find a new host for the show. Was there any blowback from that?
That was a fucking night. Geez. To be fair, I didn’t know Jon Stewart was in negotiations when I said that. No one did. I also did not know that what I had said turned into what it had turned into until later that night. It remains something that I’m embarrassed about. It was funny, but it wasn’t the time. That was Trevor Noah’s moment. We’re talking about the first Black man to win for late night, and he’s got some fucking idiot behind him who was tired of the guest hosting carousel. That wasn’t cool. I apologized to the people at the show, and it ended up being water under the bridge. Thankfully, I’m still good with everybody over there. I’ve learned that you can have the best of intentions, but how it’s interpreted is how it is defined by history. Your intentions don’t matter.
There’s a joke in your new hour about how you told your mom that the Daily Show host job was yours when Trevor quit. Was there a point when you really believed that was the case?
I felt like I had as good a chance as anybody else to get that job. Absolutely. You have to remember the chain of events. I guest hosted The Daily Show at the top of April and then I did the White House Correspondents dinner two weeks later. And I did well. So I joked with my mom, “Maybe I get the job and you can quit yours.” She essentially said she would once my name was on the building. The morning when the press release went out about me leaving the show, I called my mom and she was like, “And that’s why I didn’t quit my fucking job.”
Have you ever second guessed the decision to leave when you did?
No, I don’t regret it. I felt the inevitability of change within that show. And Jon Stewart and I have a great rapport. I don’t feel like he would’ve come in and fired me, but, regardless of who it was, something was going to be different. I had the whole writers strike to think about leaving or staying.
Did you consider the durability of late night or even linear? Comedy Central is a shell of what it was when you started there in 2015.
If you look at the landscape of political satire and late night, [Have I Got News for You] is the only new show to launch in the last few years. They’re making cuts. They’re trimming fat. They took Jimmy Fallon’s Friday. The took Seth Meyers’ band. James Cordon’s show got replaced with After Midnight — which is fine, but it’s way cheaper. When I left, I didn’t necessarily consider any of this … the ease with which I would be able to sell something. And I’ve sold three shows. Let’s get that straight. But the market is resetting. Once we’re on the other side of that, I can better predict what I want to do and pull a Shannon Sharpe or a Pat McAfee.
Pat McAfee is an interesting example because he licenses his show to ESPN and isn’t just on the payroll or selling his company off.
I think the evolution of media will eventually see talent become the network, the producers and the purveyors of the content. What McAfee or SmartLess Media are doing, that will eventually be a norm. This is fucking interesting. Now you’re getting into some shit. I think about this a lot. Not everybody’s going to sell a podcast for a $100 mil because not everybody’s going to get an ROI. The idea of taking a chance on someone and just putting a motherfucker on TV? That’s done. There’s no way ESPN gives Pat McAfee $80 mil for four years cold turkey just because they’ve got a hunch. You got to have data and metrics to prove it, and his digital audience is their focus group.
And you think the rest of TV will follow that example?
I really believe that the boys we see on TV right now are last of their kind. Ain’t going to be no more $20 million-a-season white men at 11:30. And whatever comes next is going to be something that’s already been ideated and connecting with people, because the networks are hedging bets. I won’t call ’em broke, but they’re definitely hedging bets. That makes me excited because that means anybody can create anything. Everything is on the table.
What is the brass ring for you? Hosting a show? Acting in something you create? Selling out MSG?
There’s a Chris Rock quote I always loved. He said everything he does is to just get people to pay money to see him live. I’ll never abandon stand-up comedy, because it’s the one thing that can’t be taken away from me. Of course, you want to get rich, host a show, get a nice cushy podcasting deal somewhere or whatever. That’s fine. But the idea of connecting with strangers on the stage will never get old to me. I’d like to say I want a career as a working actor, on the level of what Kevin Hart does, but I don’t know if I have that work ethic. I need a couple of months off to just get in a room with podcast mic or pop onto CNN and yell at politicians.
This story appears in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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