White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Roy Wood Jr. Talks About What Worked, What Got Left Out & Whether He’d Do The Gig Again
Right up until he took the lectern at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this past weekend, Roy Wood Jr. was texting with his writers, making revisions.
Gone from his set: a joke about Rupert Murdoch. Too close to a well-received joke just used by President Joe Biden.
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Added: A line about Anthony Fauci, inserted after Wood was informed that the doctor was an attendee in the Washington Hilton ballroom.
On Monday, Wood spoke to Deadline about how he pulled off one of the hardest gigs in comedy – performing before the 2,600 journalists, politicos and CEOs packed into the cavernous space. The reviews have been very positive, no easy feat considering the influential audience at the ready to scrutinize and judge. It also wasn’t always immediate apparent whether many in the crowd found a joke funny: With C-SPAN cameras trained on crowd reaction, some reporters were extra cautious about not guffawing too much at any one line, lest they be caught breaking standards of objectivity.
“It was a constant process of just putting stuff together,” Wood said of his performance.
Best known as a correspondent for The Daily Show, Wood described a weeks-long process to hone the material, 90% much of which was tried out at the Comedy Cellar in New York and then in a drop-in at D.C. Improv on Friday evening.
Some material was so specific to the event that he had to rely on blind faith that it would work. That was true about his first line, directed at Biden: Real quick, Mr. President. I think you left some of your classified documents up here, as he started to hand POTUS a sheet of paper.
Wood was given no advance word of the president’s remarks, as is tradition at the event, he said.
At the dinner, Biden quipped of the Murdoch, How can I dislike a guy who makes me look like Harry Styles? On hearing that, Wood decided to toss out his own age-related joke about Murdoch, connected to the size of the $787.5 million Fox-Dominion settlement. “Best joke wins,” Wood said. “A joke about age will always be funnier from an old man, not a 44-year-old.”
Also important was the structure of Wood’s set, carefully crafted to his own style as well as that of the crowd. Biden’s remarks forced Wood to scramble some of the structure of his material.
“I’m a stickler for joke proximity as well,” Wood said. “He had a Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon bit, and he did it kind of closer to the end of his set. …So by the time I got on stage I feel like everyone is still thinking and laughing about his jokes about Tucker or Don. So I moved the George Santos joke up ahead of that to create a little bit more separation between all my stuff. So we can’t have back-to-back Tucker and Don jokes in succession, because it’s just in the audience’s mind. My joke isn’t going to get as much of a laugh, I don’t think, until you’re not thinking about the topic again.”
In his set, Wood quipped, To Tucker’s 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.
The joke about Lemon was just as biting. Speaking of assholes, Don Lemon is out of a job, Wood said, adding, Don Lemon. My dog, Don Lemon. Don Lemon released a statement saying he got fired from CNN, then CNN released a statement saying that they offered Don a meeting. They had to part ways, because Don Lemon can’t even accurately report a story about Don Lemon.
The dinner took place six days after Lemon was fired by CNN, so the challenge was to find jokes that weren’t already exhausted. Quips about Lemon being “past his prime” were off limits. “We were trying to make sure that we didn’t step on anything anybody else had already said on the internet,” Wood said. “Social media really did make comedy writing more of a heavy lift.”
He also said that he avoided spending too much time on a figure who, for years now, has been a standup favorite, Donald Trump.
“I didn’t want to live in it too long, but I did want to speak about the media’s back and forth of how those document scandals were handled,” Wood said. “It was not necessarily having a solution, but let’s just acknowledged that it happened.”
Wood also said that he was uncertain how his material on Vice President Kamala Harris would go over, in which he quipped about the double standard toward her versus past occupants of the office, like Mike Pence. Wood quipped at the dinner, I think the most insulting scandal to fall to the feet of the Biden Administration was placed at the feet of our Madam vice president, the scandal of ‘What Does Kamala Do?.
“That material I wasn’t sure about because I know that some people have strong opinions about the vice president, but it seems like it came out [OK]. I think it was in The Shade Room, which is a big deal, especially in the Black community.” The site characterized Wood as defending Harris, and he agreed. “To a degree it was…If she has done stuff, and nobody acknowledges that, that is just stating what’s what,” he said.
“It is not me going, ‘I am going to save Kamala from the people,’ but I enjoy starting jokes from a dangerous place and then trying to come back,” he added.
Wood said that Harris told him afterward, “It was really funny. I am sure your mother is proud.” His mother, Joyce Dugan Wood, got to meet her backstage.
Wood said that he also was happy with how a joke about Clarence Thomas went. We can all see Clarence Thomas… but he belongs to billionaire Harlan Crow — and that’s what an NFT is, Wood said at the dinner, referring to reports of Crow’s lavishing of trips and gifts on the Supreme Court justice.
But a joke tied to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and how “great leaders in this room” know “how to make things not happen” did not do so well, Wood noted. “That got nothing,” he said.
“Someone was telling me, ‘Don’t think anything about anyone not laughing. It is just a big room. It’s a hard room,” he said.
Wood also wanted to slip something in about the presence of GOP figures like Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pompeo being a sign that Republicans have returned to the dinner, after avoiding it during the Trump years.
“We just couldn’t get to everything,” he said.
Wood said that he approached his set differently than previous entertainers, like Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, as they were better known that he is. That made it necessary for him to stock the initial part of his 25-minute set with a barrage of material, with some longer satirical commentary placed in the second half.
“People are very quick to say, Oh, but you are on The Daily Show,'” Wood said. “But The Daily Show ain’t my standup comedy. So you don’t know me as a performer. You don’t know my heart. You don’t know where I am coming from. So I had to be very careful about anything serious – I’m talking about early, because I’m just killing my own introductory moment. So I have to be funny, funny, funny.”
He also said that, because of the timing of his material, he wasn’t able to get to the “nuance to the Don Lemon thing.”
“Everybody’s laughing [when] I said ‘Don Lemon is an asshole.’ OK. But Don Lemon also did a lot of really good journalism,” he said. “Regardless of behaviors on and off the air that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, there are a lot of times on air when Don Lemon gave pushback to people who are talking real crazy about marginalized communities, and issues that are affecting millions of Americans. And so the question becomes, ‘Who is going to take that place at CNN? Who replaces Don Lemon’s tenacity?’ But figuring out a funny and brief but still sincere way to say that at the top of the set, I don’t know. That is a detriment to the next five minutes of jokes.”
What really stood out as different from past comedians was his finisher, as he spoke of his mother Joyce Dugan Wood and his late father, Roy Wood Sr., a pioneering journalist and entrepreneur. Wood said that he had not initially planned on the moment, but that changed as he learned that a topic of the evening would be the concern for journalists currently being held in captivity.
“For all the international war reporting that [Wood Sr.] did, before settling into the civil rights movement, he never spoke with me about it,” Wood said. “There’s almost 400 journalists in jail right now, all over the globe. My pop could have been one of them. And he never talked about it. It was one of the few things we never talked about.”
Wood’s writing team included Christiana Mbakwe-Medina, Ameberia Allen, Felonious Munk, Matt Negrin, David Angelo and Lily Blumkin, as well as writers’ assistant Kalia Tison.
Wood said that he most modeled his performance on that of Cedric the Entertainer, who appearedi n 2005, while he sought advice from figures such as Hasan Minaj, who was featured entertainer in 2017. Wood said he forgot one important tip that Minhaj gave him: To drink a lot of water beforehand. “My mouth was so dry, so I was talking so slow,” he said. Wood also has advice for others who do the gig: “Never say no to a circle table gala,” he said, noting that he recently did a charity event with similarities in set up.
“It was definitely a room where there were a lot of big checkbooks,” he said. “And so that type of person is probably closer to the type of person that would have been at the Correspondents’ Dinner,” he said, noting that “half the room is not even facing you. They are not even comfortable while watching.”
Despite the extensive preparation and challenges of the room, Wood also said he was up for doing it again. “Yeah, I think I would,” he said.
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