How George Carlin influenced Roy Wood Jr.
On fearlessness, wordplay, and other comedy wisdom.
Always enjoy listening to Roy Wood Jr. talk shop. For example, check out his interview on A Good One podcast: Roy Wood Jr. Won’t Stop Pushing Stand-up Forward.
Recently, a NYT profile explained how Wood “finds humor in the moments that leave us humbled and confused.” [gift link] I picked out some of the best bits below…
He deals in confusion and humility instead of certainty.
Where so much of contemporary comedy is steeped in certainty, trading jokes for smart points, Wood is interested in the moments that leave us humbled and confused.
He doesn’t badger those who disagree.
He is wearied but stays firm in the notion that his job isn’t to badger and demean the half of the country that disagrees with him.
He cross-pollinates Daily Show “bien-pensant1 liberal comedy” with Southern blackness.
Though he became famous for his “Daily Show” work, the Black vernacular is his bread and butter. You see it in the exaggerated physicality he adopts in the Deon story, the way he thrusts his head out and stares down the audience with an expression reminiscent of Bernie Mac; or in the distinctly Southern phrasing he’ll adopt when playing one of his many characters. The cross-pollination yields a brand of comedy whose values are clear but that never loses sight of life’s unpredictability.
Before we go on, I just wanna encourage you to watch my special BOLO at YouTube. People are digging it.
Carlin influenced him with his wordplay and fearlessness.
George Carlin, he says, was canon for the fearlessness of his topics and concision with which he expressed opinions that audiences might otherwise find outré. “I used to listen to ‘You Are All Diseased’ once a week, listening to the wordplay and the inflections. It was just perfect. Then I would immediately throw on some Master P.”
Never talk down to ‘em. Instead, present your experience and, y’know, make it funny.
Wood’s style was molded by the difficulty of finding his voice in Black clubs across the South. His own middle-class experience of Blackness wasn’t necessarily aligned with his audience’s, and his early jokes — routines about the annoyance of a roommate’s eating your food, for example — didn’t always land. Working those rooms taught him how to craft observational humor in a way that would resonate for everyone from older Black professionals to gang members. But he also learned not to talk down to people. “A Black audience will go with you anywhere on any journey,” he said, “if you make it funny.” He learned to embrace his off-kilter humor without condescending. “That’s what I know about,” he said. “I don’t know about selling weed. That’s not my experience, and my job as a comedian is to present to you my experience. And mine is a weird one.”
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Find what they have in common and unify the room.
Eventually he found himself in front of increasingly diverse audiences, too. “One night I’m performing for drug dealers, the next night I’m performing for coal miners in eastern Kentucky — what are the unifiers?” he recalled. His task, as he saw it, was to find the joke that would make both groups laugh. One of his best jokes from those days, he told me, was about being pulled over by the police and figuring out whether or not you’re going to jail based on how long it takes for an officer to get back to you after he runs your ID. It was a perfect bit, he said, because it could unify the room. “White people got friends that go to jail!” he said. “Especially rednecks. Poor white people deal with the same stuff that Black people do.”
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Keep it goofy and you can get serious.
Wood’s critique — the way technology has left us prone to dysfunctional loneliness — is trenchant, but his approach is fundamentally goofy. There’s a strange way, too, in which the goofiness reinforces the melancholy at the heart of his joke, a yearning for an entire range of interactions that have fallen to the wayside in a world that doesn’t have use for them.
Touring builds the connection muscle. Refining his act in front of all sorts of audiences is grounding.
“I spent the first decade of my career meeting Americans where they were, figuring out what was important to them and figuring out how to make those things funny,” he told me. “Every armpit, every factory town, every we-used-to-make-something-here city — I’ve done it. So you start realizing that a lot of people are all individuals, and to a degree most are harmless.” People are only dangerous, he believes, when they allow their selfishness and ideological rigidity to blind them to the suffering of others. His touring feels like a shield against that selfishness, an investment in a connection with his fellow Americans.
Read the rest at NYT. [gift link]
Related:
I had to look up bien-pensant, it means conventional or orthodox in attitude