I want to bring on my next guest.
You know him from The Daily Show.
He's got some hilarious specials on Comedy Central.
He's the first comedian that I've ever met.
Please welcome Roy Wood Jr.
Hello Moses
[Moses] Thank you for being here man.
That's my accent. That's the best I could do.
Hey thank you man. Thank you for having me.
This is crazy where we are. It's a full circle moment.
You're honestly the first comedian I've ever met.
It was maybe 2009.
We were making online YouTube videos together
and here we are again.
Oh shit, yeah with the homie Dave!
Yeah!
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah I'm thinking LA, yeah 2000-
Yeah, its been a minute since then.
Oh my God I'm old.
Yeah, it's weird where we are.
We're kind of essentially, every comic is
becoming a YouTuber.
[Roy] Yeah, that's what I'm learning,
I'm getting to that place now.
Ordering mics, and super cool sound proofing equipment
to help my career. Its like, oh God.
Yeah, a lot of the soundproofing stuff I'm ordering
is just so like my girlfriend doesn't hear
how embarrassing online stand-up is.
[Roy] Yeah, there's something to it
where even with the emojis coming up,
and people like clapping or whatever,
I still feel like I'm bombing.
I don't know how you guys do the online show.
I tried a couple early in quarantine
and I just knew immediately,
I don't have the performance shot.
It's a special talent to come through somebodies phone.
Yeah.
[Roy] You got to bring it, and my comedy
doesn't bring it physically.
It's not expressive. It's just,
I'm the guy sitting in the corner complaining.
If you pay attention you might learn something,
but that doesn't come through on our phones
The things that you told me back
in 2009 are things I still carry with me today.
Well thank you man, I'm glad it was decent advice.
I'm glad I wasn't a bitter, angry soul
who just told you to go get a job and go to college.
Quit! We don't need another
white guy talking about Triscuits.
But that's the thing I want to bring up
is that you wrote an article in Vulture,
essentially of the future of comedy.
And it talked about, essentially, the lowest man
on the totem pole of how everyone kind of moves down a rung.
You were playing arenas, you're not
going to be playing comedy clubs, and anyone that was-
The biggest venues will open last,
so the comics who played the biggest venues
will play the venue the next size down essentially.
Yeah.
Which forces everybody below them down a rung,
which cuts your money, which means you
need to figure out another way to make money.
And I think guys are figuring out, like,
just for perspective, what's the guy? Terry Fator?
I'm not sure how to pronounce his last, I think its Fator,
plays in Vegas, has a regular residency in Vegas.
He's doing, like, comedy clubs right now
until the Vegas venues open up.
So, you know he's gonna sell tickets,
and the comedy clubs have to book the best acts,
because they're trying to keep their lights on.
So, it's nothing, I didn't say that
in a way to hate on comics.
I'm just saying that's how the industry's
going to have to survive.
No, I mean-
That's what has to happen, and God bless
the big-wigs for coming back to the clubs
for a little while to keep the clubs open.
So, you know, I think it's a good thing.
No, I think a hundred percent.
I mean, if anything it prepared me,
because I'm exactly the person you're talking about.
Where I'm the lowest man on the totem pole,
where you're just headlining,
you're just starting to fill rooms,
and then everything has completely come true.
Everything that you wrote down in the article,
and this is really early March, when people are like,
this will probably be over in May.
It's all coming true now. So I wonder,
what do you see now? So now that was, what?
Four or five months ago. Do you see any,
is there any future-tellings you have now?
Here's the thing, like, everybody thinks about comedy
as these big name acts coming through,
but like honestly, the average comedy club,
thirty weeks out of the year, its road dogs
that are helping keep the lights on.
It's the Tuesday through Thursday shows.
Those are the shows that help keep the club profitable.
On the weekends or whatever, I think that those guys,
I think you have to start creating your own stages.
You have to start, because here's what I think,
you gotta bunch of restaurants that are fucked
because they can't get as many people
in as they want, or people are scared.
So you gotta have something to attract them.
So it might be a symbiotic relationship, you know?
The think is just that the bigger issue right now,
what I didn't feel like I accounted for,
was the massive amount of unemployment.
Yeah
[Roy] As entertainers, we are disposable income activity.
So, even if the clubs are opening back up,
how many people have twenty to thirty dollars
to spend? And that's not counting all the people surviving.
Everybody counts Covid in deaths,
but the people who survive, bitch,
they've got medical bills out their ass.
Right
[Roy] How many people are going to be able
to go out and just have a night out?
Like on a date night in a comedy club,
that's an eighty dollar spend.
Twenty on tickets, twenty on drinks, it's forty ahead.
As someone who hates this, and has very best interest,
it is a waste of money to be in a club.
Especially when there are so many great Netflix specials,
people on Twitch, people on YouTube doing the same thing
or something higher quality that you could stay home.
So why go out and spend money on two drinks,
a whole plate of food, risk your life,
and then the odd chance that the comedian is good.
Do you think that, so Chris Rock
had a quote years ago where he said that
"everything that I do is to bring people to my live show"
anything that he did within his portfolio
was to sell a seventy or eighty,
whatever his ticket cost is to get someone to see him live.
Do you think it's the flip now?
Where if you do the live show for free,
you do the live show at a cheaper rate,
you do it at a park, or a drive-in,
or whatever wacky place the next year
holds for us at thirty percent capacity.
Do you think the live show is the new conduit
to drive people online where you can
monetize through advertisements.
Via your podcast, if you have a web series,
or whatever the fuck else you're doing,
I honestly feel like-
[Moses] I think you're looking ahead.
Yes, I do think yes that is,
but I think that a lot of comedians
have not understood that yet.
I think a lot of them are very foolish.
I think there's a lot of people within our craft
that are very dismissive of technology.
They're very dismissive of the evolution
of how people consume information.
And at the end of the day, you can be the purest,
I start on the stage, I'm old school.
Okay, but you gotta go where the people are
and how people are taking in stuff.
I honestly think that Chappelle
has changed how the hour special will be constructed.
If you look at the turn time from, shoot,
like, the average hour special is probably shot
eight months before it airs, right?
And that window is getting shorter and shorter
because public attention spans are shorter,
the news cycle changed, if you write
a joke in April, that's not even relevant
in fucking August, by the time it airs.
[Moses] Yeah.
Yvonne Orji I think had a, she shot her HBO special
in February, and I think it aired Mother's Day,
so that's maybe three months from shoot to air.
That's an incredibly short runway.
And then Chappelle did 836 which, I would argue,
two months total, working on some of that material.
But so much of it was about George Floyd,
and so close to it, above maybe three weeks
from conception to air.
[Moses] So does that mean that
the special gets less special,
and people are not putting ten years
of work into a special? Like I was just about
to tape my special right before the shut down,
and that's like ten years of work.
So now are you looking at just a comic
that's been on the road for six months?
That's the special, comes out immediately.
I think that you have to tap into,
right now, people are more connected
to emotions than laughs,
and I think Chappelle's shit worked
because he touched peoples emotions.
And so, I don't think it makes a special
any less special, it just has to be
more in the moment, and right now,
our moments change faster than they did
under the previous comedy construction timeline.
The assembly line has to be shorter now.
So, you can still have an hour special,
but if you had a special, I give you a perfect example,
so I was like forty percent, I had about forty percent
of my next hour done when Covid hit
with the plan of taping in November.
So, around March I had about twenty, twenty-five minutes
that I went-
[Hands Clapping]
this is good, this is for sure, we'll work.
There's probably four or five minutes of that material
that I would even want to spew now because just tonally, no.
Like I had a whole thing about
Congressional hearings, and how bullshit
the concept of a Congressional hearing,
nobody wants to hear about that.
Good luck getting anyone to care about any of that stuff.
But in January,
Yeah.
That was the thing, and it was always the thing,
and it happened, its crazy to think
that I have jokes about mass shootings,
and the whole concept of how and where they occur,
and how the coverage is,
how the media covers mass shootings.
Even that is eh.
[Moses] Yeah.
Do you even want to talk about that right now?
Because even when a mass shooting happens,
it doesn't get the coverage that it got pre-Covid.
Because there's just something more ominous,
and then you don't know who the fuck
is gonna win in November.
Which is also gonna change the tone of the country, so.
You do a lot of political humor,
how do you feel about that?
How do you feel about doing another four years
of essentially Trump jokes.
I mean with The Daily Show, it's all encouraged,
it's what you cover. So where do you feel like that is?
If Trump wins again, do you have it in you to just be like,
what else could you make fun of?
I don't know if you can make fun of it anymore
because it just keeps getting more and more serious.
It's like the vice just keeps getting
tighter, and tighter, tighter.
I think the last time I righteously laughed at Trump
was when he looked at the solar eclipse.
[Both Laugh]
Yeah, the time he looked into the sun, yeah.
Yeah and like the day after that he's like,
all right, get them kids in the cages,
and I was like, I can't laugh anymore.
I don't know, man. I know that at the end of the day,
it's my job as a corespondent to put
a face to the people that are struggling
and dealing with a lot of b.s. in the country,
and I find a joke in that.
So, I'll have to keep doing that, but,
you know, you take a deep breath and do your job.
I would prefer that that's not the situation
come Wednesday morning in November,
but, you know, we'll see.
Are there things that maybe comics should be doing.
So obviously investing in themselves.
You know, things they should not be doing.
Have you seen things of like, oof,
don't go live everyday, no one needs to hear your thoughts.
I wouldn't say don't go live everyday,
but if you're gonna go live everyday, create an archive.
Yeah
[Roy] Like I don't understand why people go
on IG Live everyday and they don't save these shits.
Like if I don't watch it live,
like you have the audacity to promote yourself
as a live appointment viewing with no option
for me to binge it later, when all we are,
as a society, habitually, is a
binge consumption audience now.
Yeah
[Roy] What do you think you're the eleven o'clock news
where if I just miss you, I miss you? No,
you're a dude in a chair with a laptop.
You're spitting funny stuff, but save it
so that people can find it later
or chop it down to snippets.
I just think that you're in a space now
where everybody's equal, nobody's better than you.
I've seen some of the greatest comics on Earth
with some of the shittiest framing and lighting,
and their Zoom chats.
Oh yeah
So you could easily create,
create the content that you want to be higher to make.
Like, just start doing that. And if you don't know how,
find somebody else that's hungry. Team up.
Like this is the time to do that man.
Yeah to invest yourself, and you say,
team up, get as close to other people as possible
so that you're pushing. Try to get in there.
[Roy] You've got to be able to create
on a regular basis and have, you know,
some level of an agenda and specificity.
All this, like when you talk to Ron in a second,
Ron Funches has probably done it better than most, man.
Ron, 'cause Ron is not trying to,
let's talk about everything, no. Bitch, I like wrestling.
Yeah
Lets discuss it. And I think specificity is the new broad.
So, find out, figure out what it is you're passionate about.
And I think if you lock in on that type of stuff,
and you know, then I think you're in the space
where you find something that speaks to
a very specific group of people,
and then that's how you build your audience, man.
So that when the streets open back up again,
and there is a cure, and were having sex with no condoms,
and you don't have to bang doggy style anymore
to reduce the spread,
Doggy style?
[Roy] It'll be good times. Yeah,
well you know that's what they said,
you're supposed to have sex doggy style during Covid.
Oh so you don't face each other.
But at that point it seems some other transactions,
if you're doing it right, if it's not a crime,
you've been face-to-face at some point.
I think that at this point during Covid,
I think that we should all agree that
the glory hole was ahead to the curve.
Ahead of the curve!
I'm not sure if this is the type of podcast
to have that discussion,
but I think it's a fair observation at this point.
Yes. It's very safe, it's very consenting,
there's a hole, it seems like the person
on the other end has the most control
to really fight anything off
because you don't have these limbs, 'cause limbs attack.
I think a lot of these comedians
wouldn't get in trouble if they didn't have the limbs.
I would do a comedy bubble though.
I would go to Orlando for that.
There's no way I would do a comedy bubble.
You know what? I would only do a comedy bubble
with comedians that are either married or have children.
So not me.
When I, and I'm serious, when I look at the lineups
of comedians that are doing outdoor shows
in New York on the rooftops and in the parks,
most of them, thirty-five and under, no kids.
Total, like they're in a totally different set
of responsibilities, a totally different set
of people that they have to answer to.
So you can be young and wild. I'm forty-one
and I've got two people living in this house
that I gotta answer to, you know?
I'm not gonna leave her to raise him alone, so.
Not in exchange for working out a school shooting joke
that you both know isn't gonna be relevant anymore.
Not in a week. No, it is, somethings wrong
with my life where I'm free to go yell at people in a park.
That's really all it is. It's not like a show.
You're just on the same level,
and you're ruining someones day in the park.
You know who's fun to watch do outdoor shows
is Mark Normand.
Oh yeah!
Mark Normand, Mark Normand, if you
go on his YouTube channel, he's probably got about
eight or nine different shows he's done
over the course of quarantine.
He did one on sidewalk to passersby.
He did a drive-in. He did a club-
In the rain, he did one in the rain.
He did the park, yeah.
Mark went out.
So, yeah, everybody was in their car.
He couldn't even hear the laughs.
It was just people flashing lights.
Like, he's probably done every possible discipline
of outdoor show, but Mark is also a wordsmith,
he's an, like he really is like Seinfeld in that regard.
Which he really is doing it for the love of the craft.
Yeah
I don't even know if it's for the people watching.
I think it's really just for him.
But, I couldn't do that. I would love to but,
No, I mean you got a whole life
Yeah, the only other thing that
I am starting to scale back now.
I'm not going to deactivate it,
but I think I'm going to leave Twitter for a while
Okay
Well, I follow a lot of these people for the sake
of being in tune with what the streets are saying
about a lot of relevant issues but,
when you consume bad news everyday
and then you consume peoples outrage about the bad news,
it's starting to fuck with me a little.
Is that maybe advice that comics should take
and that don't take the Twitter world, who,
you know, you go on stage, a lot of people
don't even know of the person that got canceled that day,
that maybe, just for your own psyche,
to be a human being in this time, and not just be like,
oh yeah, so since I can't be on stage, I'll just tweet 24/7.
I mean if it works for you,
everybody's got a different joke machine, you know?
Twitter used to be a good place for me to run premises.
[Moses] Yeah.
But, the more delicate the topic,
the more nuanced the conversation,
and Twitter's not a place for nuance. So, you know,
if I really want to explore what people think
about a topic before I write a joke on it,
I'll take it to Facebook because you get deeper answers,
and you get more counter,
Yeah
It can turn into a cluster of arguing.
But, it's people making great points in more longer form
to help influence my analysis of the topic,
but I tweet here and there,
I don't tweet a lot about politics
because if I got something funny to say about politics,
I'm gonna pitch that on the show
and either I'm gonna say it or Trevor's gonna say it.
So, I'm not gonna burn those jokes on twitter.
So why am I here? What am I doing?
And, I mean Instagram is cool here and there,
but that's even worse 'cause it's an algorithm,
So now I'm seeing the same forty people.
Its an algorithm and it's super sad now,
and they're like, what are you posting about?
No ones vacationing. So it's very hard to find an excuse
to post a photo of your butt because
it's not like a beautiful background,
it's like oh, there's your blinds again.
Which goes back to my point of how specificity
is the new broad because everybody
is talking about the news of the day.
But do you have something deeper
that connects with people on a deeper level?
That, oh, Andre 3000, let's talk about time traveling,
rhyme javelin, something mind unraveling.
Like, that, where are the deeper conversations happening?
And they're not happening on Twitter.
No, that's great advice.
I mean thank you for going over that with us.
Specificity is the new broad, find your own audience.
Yeah you just gotta find something
you're passionate about, man. All right man,
well thank you brother. I'm gonna go check on my child-
Okay, you got a real life. Thank you so much.
Daily Show, it's back. You have great specials out.
Yeah, Father Figure and No One Loves You,
they're wherever you go to bootleg content, it's there,
I'm not gonna, just find it.
Yeah, find it, do the work.
Google my name.
Roy Wood Jr. everyone, thank you.