You guys, let's get a huge mess, and welcome going right now for the next video.
We're going right now for Mr. Roy Wood Jr.
Roy Wood Jr. How you been? Good man, good to see you.
Good to see you man, been a minute.
So full disclosure, you and I do know each other.
Yeah, oh yeah.
And I had to do this, I was looking through my archives, I pulled up this, take a look at that.
Wow, bro.
Do you remember that?
Hang on, don't tell me.
I already know from this shirt, this is before I moved to Los Angeles.
This is pre 2007.
I want to say that's 2008, Great American Comedy.
Great American, that was in Omaha, Nebraska.
Johnny Carson.
Outside of Omaha too, Norfolk.
Lincoln.
Was it Lincoln? No, it's Norfolk. It was Norfolk, Nebraska.
Of all the places you could be, U.Y. Comedy on State, how did you end up here?
Comedy on State is a legendary club.
It's hard learning the markets that have the rooms that really curate comedy in the right way
and create an environment that's conducive to laughter, to basement, the ceiling's low,
the lights are all like, it's just a great place for comedy.
I was walking around downtown Madison, all I saw was college students
and like grown-ups looking like they're looking for their college students.
Is that what downtown is? Just kids?
And just parents.
I said, where are they?
Madison in this club, it's a legendary town and a lot of big names come through here.
And 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?
What's the difference between these clubs across the state?
This club is still to me the best, you know, of that whole lot.
There are big lafers 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.
The morning of my box, a few more or three hours before it's to start,
the entire family finds out that Uncle Derek still has a flip phone.
What's funny about Wisconsin?
For me, what's funny about Wisconsin has always been,
y'all just act like it's not cold.
Like even on the way in, it's just people ice-fishing like,
why do you have to think of stuff to do outside when it's cold?
Just inside.
Find inside things to do.
Go inside, Madison.
There's this heat in the house.
Standing on the lake looking for fish to fish at the grocery store.
All right, all right.
How much freshen do you need your fish to be?
What comes to mind when you talk Wisconsin politics,
anything stick out?
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, you know,
to the bigger conversation.
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.
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, you know, with regards to the horrible, horrible tragedy
where, you know, an officer shot a nun on a black man.
And 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.
How difficult is it for you to joke about politics in this new environment?
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.
You know, we love to act like all of a sudden,
the difficulty level of the occupation of comedian has been turned up to ten.
I'm 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.
It's 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.
I live in New York now, and people have noise canceling their headphones.
How do you live like this?
In this world, you don't need to hear none of them?
At the end of the day, we're living in a society now where people have opportunities.
You know, people don't live in vacuums and opinion vacuums anymore.
They can say that they don't like something.
That's 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, that I don't like the way that joke make me feel.
I don't like the way what you're talking about makes me feel.
And those people have every right in the world to stay in position themselves as such.
And I think as a comedian, we've always been saying these things.
Does it matter to you who you poke fun at?
For me, funny is funny.
You know, 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.
Like 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, you know, our forefathers.
This country's forefathers, right?
So I'd rather poke at that and it'll let that.
And when you do that, it tends to rest a little bit more in the middle ground.
I don't know how many good cops we need either because good cops still doing a job, which means giving tickets.
My cousin ain't fooled nobody over since 2008.
That's a good talk.
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.
How is speaking of what people think?
How has the cancel culture affected how you approach the things you know?
The cancel culture hasn't affected how I put anything together.
And you know, I really push back against this concept that cancel culture exists.
You know, 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.
Is it just about a laugh or does everything you talk about have to have some sort of a point?
I don't feel like every joke I make has to have a point, but it's good if it does.
You know, I'm not here to lecture people.
You know, my last special and perfect messenger, you know, there was police reform stuff, but then it was also prison reform.
And 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.
In the work you do on The Daily Show, do you feel like that has an impact on voters? Does it move the needle?
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.
That's the goal of the show.
But, you know, I would be, it would be in disrespect to the people that watch this show.
If I didn't acknowledge this sometimes, you know, here's what's weird about working at The Daily Show.
When I started, you know, I was just a comedian, a real comic, a little bit of sitcom stuff.
But for the most part, I was a real comedian.
I didn't do a lot of acting, I wasn't casting 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 it's a different type of compliment.
And 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.
You know, 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, you know, make people's lives a little better.
And as a comedian, what do you think your role is in the conversation on race?
How do you think you're impacting race?
I don't know what my role is, you know, when it comes to solving racism.
Like, 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.
And 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, you know.
But I've never written a joke about race.
I've been like, oh, yeah, this the one out of white folks going to stop hitting us.
Like, I've never written, I don't know if that joke exists.
But, you know, I've always enjoyed just being on stage and being able to talk about things that are difficult
and make people uncomfortable.
And hopefully, you know, 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
and 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.
And most businesses are going to choose to remain open.
So, if you want to 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.
Is anything off limits to you, uh, comedically?
I'd 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.
I appreciate you coming out and risking COVID in a basement.
Have you noticed the difference in the audience is since COVID?
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...
Like, when you think about the idea of comedy, just as an occupation,
you've made a decision that I need to laugh.
I need to laugh so bad, I need a professional.
The TV can't help me tick-tock. It's not enough.
I need to go to a room.
But there is a laugh man, a laugh person, on this stage.
I call COVID two times. I call old crime, and then way back when I call it a original recipe.
I don't know if that's the name of it, but the first squeeze.
Yeah, no, back there. The other one's supposed to upgrade.
It was more than four days.
I'm not going to say that comedy, 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.
What do you like most about Wisconsin?
What do I like most about Wisconsin? Cheese curds.
In that burrito place in Appleton. I can't remember the name of Lebamba.
Lebamba, do you want me to?
I don't know if it's still open. I hope they survived COVID, but Lebamba was amazing.
Yeah, it was good.
Other than yourself, who makes you laugh?
My son makes me laugh.
My son and my mother easily do too funny as people I know.
You've got a chance to have a 30-minute conversation with anyone.
Who's that going to be?
Charles S. Dutton.
What actor plays you in a movie?
Keenan Thompson.
That's a good one.
At least she didn't say Denzel.
And last question.
If you weren't in the business of making people laugh, what do you think you'd be doing?
Firefighter.
That's why I was headed to the Firefighting or Sports Center.
Firefighters get the same hero love as cops. They get none of the public scrutiny.
You never look at a firefighter and want it to yourself if he's one of the good ones.
Rowan Junior, thank you for being your man.
Well, thank you brother. Good to see you.
Good to see you too man.
All the stuff.