In Focus with Roy Wood Jr.: What's Funny About Wisconsin?

Emcee:
You know him from “The Daily Show.” You guys, let’s get a huge Madison welcoming going right now for Mr. Roy Wood Jr.

Murv Seymour:
Roy Wood Jr.

Roy Wood Jr.:
How you been?

Murv Seymour:
Good, man, good to see you.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Good to see you, man, been a minute.

Murv Seymour:
So full disclosure, you and I do know each other.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Yeah, yeah.

Murv Seymour:
And I had to do this. I was looking through my archives, I pulled up this. Take a look at that.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Wow, bro.

Murv Seymour:
Do you remember that?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Hang on, don’t tell me. I already know from this shirt, this is before I moved to Los Angeles. This is before, this is pre-2007.

Murv Seymour:
I want to say that’s 2008, Great American Comedy.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Great American, that was in Omaha, Nebraska.

Murv Seymour:
Johnny Carson.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Johnny Carson. Outside of Omaha, Norfolk.

Murv Seymour:
Lincoln, was it Lincoln?

Roy Wood Jr.:
No, it’s Norfolk, it was Norfolk, Nebraska.

Murv Seymour:
Of all the places you could be, why Comedy on State, how’d you end up here?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Comedy on State is legendary club. You start learning the markets that have the rooms that really curate comedy in the right way and create an environment that’s conducive to laughter. It’s a basement, the ceiling’s low, the lights are all low it’s just a great place for comedy.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
Just walking around downtown Madison, all I saw was college students and grownups looking like they looking for their college students.

[Audience laughs]

Is that what downtown is, just kids and just parents saying, “Where are they? They said they would be here.”

Roy Wood Jr.:
Madison and this club, it’s a legendary town, and a lot of big names come through here.

Murv Seymour:
When we talk Wisconsin, we know that there are other good clubs in the state. We talk Skyline, we talk about the old Comedy Cafe. There’s an improv over in Milwaukee now. So, what do you look at in terms of, how do you determine what a good club is, and what’s the difference between these clubs across the state?

Roy Wood Jr.:
This club is still, to me, the best of that whole lot. They’re big laughers here. Also, this is a college town. Because it’s a college town, there’s also a higher level of intelligence. In the business, we call it comedy IQ. And this city has a high comedy IQ. Also, because it’s a capital city, it is a different feel. So you can come in and address certain topics that are relevant here that connect to the rest of the world.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
The morning of my aunt’s funeral, three hours before it’s to start, the entire family finds out that Uncle Derek still has a flip phone.

[Audience laughs]

Murv Seymour:
What’s funny about Wisconsin?

Roy Wood Jr.:
For me, what’s funny about Wisconsin has always been y’all just act like it’s not cold. Even on the way in, it’s just people ice fishing. Why do you have to think of stuff to do outside when it’s cold? Just inside find inside things to do.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
Go inside, Madison. There’s heat in the house.

[Audience laughs]

Standing on the lake looking for fish. There’s fish at the grocery store already on ice.

[Audience laughs]

How much fresher do you need your fish to be?

[Audience laughs]

Murv Seymour:
What comes to mind when you talk Wisconsin politics? Anything stick out?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Well, Wisconsin is a different place when you talk about politics. I’m not overly familiar with everything on a local level, just on a day to day. But it has been interesting with “The Daily Show” to be able to look at issues that have happened here and as they connect to the bigger conversation.

Roy Wood Jr. on “The Daily Show”:
To see it in action, we headed to the Madison Wisconsin Police Department, one of the few in the country that has an extensive anti-bias program.

Roy Wood Jr.:
My first-ever “Daily Show” piece we shot in Madison, we spoke with the Chief of Police, Mike Koval, about the police bias training that they’re putting Madison police through and with regards to the horrible, horrible tragedy where an officer shot an unarmed Black man. So, I don’t think that Wisconsin is that different from anywhere else in the world, where you have issues that are happening at a local and state level that can still be used to help have a conversation about what’s happening nationally.

Murv Seymour:
How difficult is it for you to joke about politics in this new environment?

Roy Wood Jr.:
I don’t find it difficult to joke about politics. I just think some people find it difficult to laugh about it. The comedian’s job has never changed. We love to act like all of a sudden the difficulty level of the occupation of comedian has been turned up to 10 now. Like, “Oh, no, I can’t play it.” It’s like they put it on All Madden and now you can’t beat the computer. The job is the same. My job is to talk about things hopefully from a perspective that you may not have considered or make light of it all together with no solutions in hand. And either you laugh or you don’t.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
I live in New York now, and people have noise-canceling headphones. How do you live like this?

[Audience laughs]

In this world, you don’t need to hear none of the noise?

[Audience laughs]

Roy Wood Jr.:
At the end of the day, we’re living in a society now where people have opportunities. People don’t live in vacuums, opinion vacuums anymore. They can say that they don’t like something. That’s the only difference. Comedy’s not harder, it’s just everybody has a phone, they have a social media account. There’s people that are willing to listen. There are groups that organize against people who go, “Hey, I don’t like the way that joke made me feel. I don’t like the way what you’re talking about makes me feel.” Those people have every right in the world to say and position themselves as such. And I think as a comedian, we’ve always been saying these things.

Murv Seymour:
Does it matter to you who you poke fun at?

Roy Wood Jr.:
For me, funny is funny. I’m just more of a policy person when it comes to the things that I choose to talk about on stage. I don’t really talk about people specifically. If you go through my three hour specials, there’s not a lot of indictments of persons. It’s an indictment of systems and policies, because the people change, the policies stay the same. The policies are what are the standing racist legacies of our forefathers, this country’s forefathers, rather. So, I’d rather poke at that and needle at that. And when you do that, it tends to rest a little bit more in the middle ground.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
I don’t know how many good cops we need either, ’cause good cops still doing their job, which mean giving tickets. My cousin ain’t pulled nobody over since 2008. That’s a good cop.

[Audience laughs]

Roy Wood Jr.:
If you’re talking police reform, there’s always going to be somebody in the audience who feels like you’re talking bad about the police. But if you just calm down for a second and listen to what I’m saying, I think you’ll find that there is a little bit of a middle ground in my POV. So I can’t go on stage to talk about that and concern myself with what someone who’s opposed to any type of reform. I can’t care what you think about that.

Murv Seymour:
Speaking of what people think, how has the cancel culture affected how you approach the things you joke about?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Cancel culture hasn’t affected how I put anything together, and I really push back against this concept that cancel culture exists. There isn’t a comedian that has told a joke in the last five to seven years who is in jail. There isn’t a comedian who has lost the opportunity or the space to perform. And there are tons of people lining up to pay money to see all of their favorite comedians say the things that they enjoy hearing. So, if you still have a place to come and do this as an occupation, I don’t believe there’s a concept of being canceled.

Murv Seymour:
Is it just about a laugh, or does everything you talk about have to have some sort of a point?

Roy Wood Jr.:
I don’t feel like every joke I make has to have a point. But it’s good if it does. I’m not here to lecture people. My last special, “Imperfect Messenger,” there was police reform stuff, but then there was also prison reform. At the core of it, that story was more about me and what I was going through than it was about, “Hey, not everybody should go to jail forever.” That’s implied and it’s understood, and if you leave with that, great. If not, hopefully you leave with a better understanding of how you choose to discard people who’ve made mistakes. If you’re talking about things that are relatable and things that people can connect with on an emotional level, inherently, it’s going to be worth more than just a laugh to a lot of folks.

Murv Seymour:
In the work you do on “The Daily Show,” do you feel like that has an impact on voters? Does it move the needle?

Roy Wood Jr.:
I’d say yeah, in some regards, I think so. I don’t think that’s the goal of the show. The goal of the show is to make you laugh and make sense of this so you’re not yelling at a wall every day; that’s it. Did you laugh? Yes, all right, great, see you tomorrow night at 11:00. That’s the goal of the show. But it would be in disrespect to the people that watch the show if I didn’t acknowledge that sometimes.

Here’s what’s weird about working at “The Daily Show.” When I started, I was just a comedian, road comic, a little bit of sitcom stuff, but for the most part, I was a road comedian. I didn’t do a lot of acting, I wasn’t cast in a lot of stuff. So people would know me from TV appearances doing comedy and they would go, “Hey, you’re very funny.” When I started at “The Daily Show” and as things matriculated year after year, people would come up to me who saw me on “The Daily Show,” who knew me from “The Daily Show,” and they would say, “Hey, thank you.” And that’s a different type of compliment.

There’s a level of appreciation from a lot of people for what we do and the things that we talk about and that we’re able to kind of bring a little bit of a light to. Whether or not these things affect policy every single day or every single year that’s a metric that’s hard to measure based on one news package or whatever. I can’t prove that we change policy, but I do prove that we make people’s lives a little better.

Murv Seymour:
As a comedian, what do you think your role is in the conversation on race? How do you think you’re impacting race?

Roy Wood Jr.:
I don’t know what my role is when it comes to solving racism. I’m just here to talk about it a little bit and hopefully we laugh about it and somebody’s able to take a deep breath and go out to work the next day and endure it. Hopefully, together we all come up with policies or to give you a little bit of energy to keep fighting to try and make the world a better place. But I’ve never written a joke about race and been like, “Oh, yeah, this the one. Now the white folks going to stop hating us.” I’ve never written that. I don’t know if that joke exists. I’ve always enjoyed just being on stage and being able to talk about things that are difficult and make people uncomfortable. Hopefully, for me, the perfect joke is the one that a Black person hears and goes, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” And a white person goes, “Wow, I never knew that.”

You don’t have the same degree of freedom of expression as you may have had 20 years ago in stand up comedy at a lot of traditional venues. That again, if this is about commerce culture, and we’re talking about a club wanting to keep the doors open and not being pressured by local groups who don’t like the style of performers that they’re booking, sooner or later, the club has to decide whether they want to stand for free speech or stay open. Most businesses are gonna choose to remain open. So, if you wanna do something that stirs the pot, you’re going to have to find different pots to go and perform that stuff in. I think that’s inevitable.

Murv Seymour:
Is anything off limits to you comedically?

Roy Wood Jr.:
I try not to do jokes at the expense of any marginalized communities. In middle school, we made fun of some special needs kids and the principal put us in the special needs class with those children for two weeks, and we did all of our schoolwork in the special needs class. That moment lives with me forever.

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
I appreciate you coming out and risking COVID in the basement.

[Audience laughs]

Murv Seymour:
Have you noticed a difference in the audiences since COVID?

Roy Wood Jr.:
You know what’s wild about comedy since COVID is that I feel like the audiences are more electric. I think that the people that are out really want to be out and they really want to laugh. Comedy is a release. Comedy is about when you think about the idea of comedy, just as an occupation, you have made a decision that, “I need to laugh. I need to laugh so bad, I need a professional. The TV can’t help me, TikTok is not enough. I need to go to a room where there is a laugh man, a laugh person on the stage.”

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
I caught COVID two times. I caught Omicron, and then way back when, I caught original recipe.

[Audience laughs]

I don’t know if that’s the name of it, but the first wave.

[Audience laughs]

Yeah, no, not Delta, Delta was the upgrade. There was one before Delta.

[Audience laughs]

Roy Wood Jr.:
I’m not going to say that comedy, that doing comedy now feels like 2019 again, but it definitely is close and it’s definitely, we’re in a time where people are dealing with a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. Everyone has lost someone to COVID. So, at this point, it really does feel like the people who are coming out to laugh are coming because they need to laugh, not because they just, it was either this or bowling. It doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels like they specifically came for laughter.

Murv Seymour:
What do you like most about Wisconsin?

Roy Wood Jr.:
What do I like most about Wisconsin? Cheese curds. That burrito place in Appleton. I can’t remember the name of it, La Bamba.

Murv Seymour:
Hm, La Bamba, I do not remember

Roy Wood Jr.:
I don’t know if they’re still open. I hope they survived COVID, but La Bamba was amazing.

Murv Seymour:
Yeah, it was good. Other than yourself, who makes you laugh?

Roy Wood Jr.:
My son makes me laugh. My son and my mother, easily the two funniest people I know.

Murv Seymour:
You’ve got a chance to have a 30-minute conversation with anyone, who’s that going to be?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Charles S. Dutton.

Murv Seymour:
What actor plays you in a movie?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Kenan Thompson.

[Both laugh]

Murv Seymour:
That’s a good one. At least you didn’t say Denzel.

[Roy laughs]

Murv Seymour:
And last question, if you weren’t in the business of making people laugh, what do you think you’d be doing?

Roy Wood Jr.:
Firefighter. That’s where I was headed. Either firefighting or “Sports Center.”

Roy Wood Jr. performing:
Firefighters get the same hero love as cops. They get none of the public scrutiny. You’ve never looked at a firefighter and wondered to yourself if he’s one of the good ones.

[Audience laughs]

Murv Seymour:
Roy Wood Jr., thank you for being here, man.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Man, thank you, brother, good to see you.

Murv Seymour:
Good to see you too, man.

Roy Wood Jr.:
Always a pleasure, man.

Murv Seymour:
Good stuff.