When Roy Wood Jr. played sports in high school, he spent a lot of time warming the bench, an experience that prepared him for a career in comedy.
“Your job as a substitute is to think of insults against the other team. I took pride in writing insults to throw at other 15-year-olds,” Wood recalled in a recent Zoom interview. “If I could get the ref to laugh, that was like applause. If I could get the parents to laugh, that was applause.”
There, on the sidelines, Wood discovered he was funny — a talent he’s been relentlessly honing in the decades since. After years of nonstop touring, Wood’s big break came in 2015, when he became a correspondent on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” His wry sense of humor and sharp opinions on issues like race and criminal justice made him a standout on the late-night show known for launching comedic talent. But shortly after a well-received role as emcee at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last year, Wood announced he was leaving “The Daily Show.” The news — which came amid a messy, drawn-out search to find a host to replace Trevor Noah, who steps down in 2022 after seven years on the desk — was a blow to fans who considered him the ideal successor.
But it didn’t take long for Wood to find his feet: On Saturday, the comedian will make his debut as host of “Have I Got News for You,” a panel show on CNN that will tackle the week’s headlines and attempt to fill a void in the current affairs comedy landscape.
An American version of the BBC show of the same name (a fixture on British airwaves since 1990), “Have I Got News for You” will feature guests from the worlds of politics and entertainment competing in a fast-paced news quiz show. Joining Wood will be veteran comedians Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin, who are rival team captains. While comedy talk shows are an institution in the U.K., the closest equivalent in the U.S. might be NPR’s quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” “Have I Got News for You” will tackle current events, but with a lighter, snappier touch, Wood said.
Roy Wood Jr. says the show is “an opportunity to talk about the news, but we can spice it up how we like, in terms of how deeply we want to go about a particular topic.”
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
“We can be in a very interesting space, between, say, a Jimmy Fallon and a ‘Daily Show,’” Wood said, alternating sips of two smoothies, one fruity pink and the other healthy green. “It’s an opportunity to talk about the news, but we can spice it up to our liking, in terms of how deeply we want to approach a particular topic.”
After so much time on “The Daily Show,” where every article, no matter how silly, made a political point, Wood is eager to let loose.
“The burden of having to argue every time is no longer on my shoulders,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to live with jokes first and opinions later.”
For Wood, the intersection of news and entertainment is familiar territory. He studied broadcast journalism at Florida A&M University, a historically black school, and his father, Roy Wood Sr., was a pioneering radio journalist known for his coverage of the civil rights movement and black platoons in Vietnam, and co-founded the first black radio network.
But Wood also gravitated toward comedy from a young age, watching Zucker brothers movies and Nickelodeon shows like “You Can’t Do That on Television” and “Clarissa Explains It All.” When the cable company in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, acquired Comedy Central, she discovered stand-up comedy, but it wasn’t until she was in college that she decided to give it a shot. She started with open-mic nights at nearby Florida State “so if I failed, I could go back to the quaint quiet of my own campus.”
After graduating, instead of going into journalism, he was hired as a morning radio host at the Birmingham station where his father had worked. As he was replacing comedian Rickey Smiley, whose prank calls were popular with listeners, Wood was forced to master the art as well. “I did what I could to make them very effective, not realizing that, in retrospect, those prank calls were the perfect training ground for street interviews on ‘The Daily Show,’” he said.
He continued to travel and perform stand-up comedy around the country. Wood’s early comedy wasn’t very political, but as he grew older he began to explore socially conscious themes that were “innately buried in my subconscious,” he said, a result of his upbringing in black communities in the South.
“The more you become familiar with what’s going on in the world, the more you think, ‘Wow, this is what my dad was talking about. The government doesn’t care,’” he said. “In all these talks I went to with my dad, where I was in the back of the room playing my Game Boy and not paying attention, he was talking about real things. That started to become more evident in my work. Once I got The Daily Show, I had to admit that I’m a funnier version of my dad.”
Wood joined “The Daily Show” just as South African Noah was replacing Jon Stewart, infusing the celebrated late-night program with a younger, more diverse and global perspective on the news. Wood’s tenure began a few months after Donald Trump announced his first run for the White House, coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 insurrection. It was, to say the least, a tricky time to be doing political comedy.
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
“The most important thing I learned from watching Trevor Noah is that you shouldn’t let anger contaminate your sense of humor. It’s outrageous what’s happening in America, but the moment you let yourself be consumed by anger, you lose the ability to make fun of anything,” he said.
Wood recalls the episode recorded on the day the officer who killed Philando Castile was found not guilty. “I remember Trevor not allowing anger, but compassion, to drive the segment. If I recall correctly, there was not a single joke in that first act,” he said. “He just spoke truthfully to the camera about where we are as a country. There were many moments where Trevor could have used that pulpit to insult America, and he never did, instead using calmness as a more precise scalpel.”
Noah abruptly left at the end of 2022, and a rotation of guest hosts, including Wood, auditioned to become his replacement. When it became clear that onetime favorite Hasan Minhaj wasn’t going to get the job, Wood began to worry that there was no plan for “The Daily Show” as it headed into an election year — and as massive changes were underway at Comedy Central’s parent company, Paramount Global. “At that point, Jon Stewart coming back was not in the conversation,” she said. “For me, I felt like, ‘What’s my life going to be like after ‘The Daily Show’? If they pick someone who doesn’t want me as a correspondent, then what am I going to do next year?’”
He thought, “If I am to eventually find a place to land, I might as well start that process now.”
“Have I Got News for You” arrives at a time of a contraction in current affairs humor on television, as networks scale back political programming that had a boom during the Trump administration. But “Have I Got News for You” aims to fill a void of shows that straddle the line between pop culture and politics. “We’re trying to talk about issues that have stakes without putting them on the line,” Wood said, noting that the show will be taped on Fridays, giving it a head start on breaking news.
“Roy is not a reporter or a news anchor, but he certainly could be. He happens to be hilarious,” said Ruffin, who hosted his own nightly show on Peacock for three seasons. “Roy knows all the current news but also the story behind it, which to me is amazing. Even when you think, ‘Well, he’s not going to have the backstory on this,’ he does.”
“Roy has a kind of gravitas. He feels like he belongs in that chair,” Black said, praising Wood’s ease as a comedian. “He seems like a guy you could be hanging out around the grill with at a barbecue, whereas I’m the jerk who’s going to say, ‘Do you have Impossible Burgers? ’”
Wood has been preparing by taking notes on Steve Harvey on “Family Feud,” because he is “the king of hearing something ridiculous, pausing and reacting to it and then getting the game back on track.” As for dream guests, he wants to hire as many sitting politicians and media personalities as possible and hold them accountable, in a fun way. As he puts it, “Let’s make fun of the emperor for not having pants, and then invite the emperor’s tailor and find out, ‘Why didn’t you give the emperor pants?’”
And while he's excited about “Have I Got News for You,” he's keeping an open mind about the future.
“If 'The Daily Show' calls me, I'm not going to send them to voicemail,” he said, “but I am dating someone.”
