A good comedian has to "know what regular people are going through," Roy Wood Jr. says. In his new Hulu special, Lonely Flowers, Wood riffs on how isolation has sent society spiraling. He spoke with Tonya Mosley about leaving The Daily Show, learning from other comics, and how an arrest pushed him to pursue stand-up.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today, comedian Roy Wood Jr., takes the serious, sometimes absurd stuff we deal with in everyday life and makes us laugh about it. Even news events that on the face of it are kind of scary, like white men in America gravitating to militia groups.
You had to know the militias was coming. You knew it was coming. It's America. What we do in America? You have progress, then you have backlash. That's the cycle of this country. Progress, then backlash. You knew the militias was coming. Just look at the last four, five years.
You can't have the first black woman vice president, the first black woman Supreme Court justice, and the first black woman mermaid. It was too much.
And they couldn't handle it. That mermaid, that's the one that broke them, that damn mermaid. When they get that little mermaid remake, they be like, oh no, brothers. Meet me at the bakery tomorrow, brothers. We're losing the White House, we're losing the courthouse. There's a fish in the water, brothers.
That's Roy Wood Jr. in his latest comedy special, Lonely Flowers, on Hulu. It's Wood's take on how isolation has sent society spiraling into a culture of guns, protests, rude employees, self-checkout lanes, sex parties. And he also talks about why some of us would rather be alone than connected. Wood is known for his razor-sharp wit.
He spent years on the stand-up comedy circuit, dissecting pop culture and current events, and for nearly eight years, he was a correspondent for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Wood currently hosts the CNN News Quiz show, Have I Got News For You?, which was adapted from a long-running British series under the same name. Roy Wood Jr., thank you for being here, and welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you for having me back. It is a pleasure.
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