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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Jenny Mack, you never give any attention to Roywood Junior’s news show. Have I got news for you on CNN? I know, and the CNN publicists put out so many articles about it, and I’ve barely talked about it.
The La Times spoke to Roywood Junior. They talked about his time playing sports in high school. He warmed the bench. Roy said, your job as a bench of warmer is to come up with the heckles against the other team. I took pride in writing insults to hurl at other fifteen year olds.
If I could get the umpire to laugh, that was like an applause break. If I got the parents to laugh, that was the standing. Oh. Roy says, We’re a very interesting piece of real estate with this new show. In between say a Jimmy Fallon and a daily show, it’s an opportunity to talk about the news, but we get to season it for taste in terms of the depth in which we want to go on a particular topic.
A sidebar here. The La Times writes, as roy Wood said that sentence, he was alternating tips of two smoothie. Is one a fruity pink, the other a healthy green, fascinating. I might head over to the smoothie place after I record this. They have this new cinnamon smoothie that’s so good.
I might have to go get one. Where he says, the burden of making the argument every single time is not on my shoulders anymore. It’s a chance to live within the jokes first, the opinions. Second. The conversation turned to his time at The Daily Show, and he said, the biggest thing I learned from watching Trevor Noah’s not to let anger pollute your sense of humor.
It’s infuriating what’s happening in America, But the moment you allow yourself to be consumed by the anger, you lose your ability to make fun of everything. I remember Trevor allowing not anger, but compassion to drive his segment about a police shooting. As I recall, there wasn’t a single joke in the first act. He just spoke sincerely to the camera about where we are as a country. There were so many moments where Trevor could have used the pulpit to cuss America out, and he never did it, but instead he used calmness as a more precise scalpel.
Interesting. I’m going to use the word spin here. This isn’t the way I remember it, But the La Times rites. When it became clear that one time front runner Hasan Minhaj wasn’t going to get the Daily Show job, Wood started to worry that there was no plan for the Daily Show as it headed into an election year. Roy says, at that point, John Stewart coming back was not in the conversation.
For me, it felt like, well, what is life going to be for me after the Daily Show? If they picked somebody that doesn’t want me it as a correspondent, then what am I gonna do next year? If I’m gonna have to eventually find a place to land, I should just start that process now, all right? That is fair. I think my point is that the La Times left out the part where they weren’t obviously not considering Roy for the desk either.
Amber Ruffin said, Roy knows every current news story but also the history of them, which is amazing to me. Even when you think, oh, he’s not gonna have the backstory on this, he does. Roy has a kind of gravitas. He feels like he belongs in the chair. He just feels like a dude you might be hanging with around the grill at a barbecue, Whereas on the jerkvase, who’s gonna be like, do you have impossible burgers?
Roy Wood has been preparing for the show by watching Steve Harvey host Family Feud. Why because he’s the king of hearing something ridiculous, pausing and reacting to it, and then getting the game back on track. He’s keeping in open mind about the future and said if the Daily Show called, I’m not gonna send them a voicemail, but I am dating someone. The CNN press team got Vulture to write about the show, Hey, Amber ruffin, how did you wind up getting hired as one of the team captains? Amber said, they had a bunch of us tests for it, and it was just the most fun little reunion.
It was everybody who’s kind of in this space, was all the late night people, the funny news podcasters, the people who had late night shows. Well, should be asking her pals to be on her team. No one’s asking me who should be on the show. I don’t have any control of who’s on the show or not, or else it’d be all my friends, which I guess it would be fine. I don’t even know who’s going to be on this Friday.
They tape Friday and at air Saturday. How’s the show different than the UK version? It’s a little more game show. Esk gets overflowing with punchlines, the goals to give your fastest answered many times that’s wrong or silly, and because we’re all comedians, it’s very much like an improvised late night show that’s out behaves. We’re spitting out punch lines at a teams and sat down and thought through, which makes it more fun and truer than your regular show.
It’ll be different that the segments are way tighter than your run of the mill British panel show. I think it’s very segment heavy and bit heavy, whereas the other panel shows can get to yepping. How do you decide who wins? Roy is deciding who gets points and he can be bought before every show. It’s on the whims of Roy.
It’s how he’s feeling. So yeah, I’m gonna bring him presents. I want to win. Let’s stay political for a second. The Daily Beast spoke to Samuel Wiles.
He does stand up comedy in La and resembles jd Vance, and he has started doing a jd Vance impression. Wile said, I’m always kind of clocking guys with big round heads and beards and media, the fact that we both have light eyes and kind of high school teacher speaking voices. With a bonus coincidence. He started doing his Vance impression on TikTok on August seventh, while channeling jd Vance In a recent video, he had Vance reading letters from constituents and said, dear future VP Van s, a Haitian illegal broke into my house and ate my dog between two slices of wonderbread. He was wearing nothing but a cape and a sinister top hat.
He escaped on a skateboard powered by dark magic. How does he come up with ideas? He thought about how much I don’t like JD Vance, but also how awful would be to be him. I started writing down stuff I thought he would say, because I thought I could talk about it as stand up. But then I wrote for like ninety minutes straight.
It was so easy. I read Hillbilly Eligi when it came out. I remember liking it while I was reading it, then putting it down and going, oh wait, what an a hole. Then when he became an outright conservative media figure that it seemed really logical. It’ll never not be funny to me that he’s a huge fraud.
No one likes him. He doesn’t even get the benefit of this weird lying. His life would be so much easier if he could be honest, but there’s so many layers that he can’t have an honest moment. Now part of what makes a good advance impression mascara, He says, My fiance works in beauty and did my eyeliner for the first round of videos, and we both kind of realized it needed to look worse. So now I just get the three dollars wet and wild from Walgreens and mash it into my eyes on my own.
Shout out to Walgreens. Nick Swartzon spoke to the eight hundred pound Gorilla, and he said, one of my favorite stories is I did a performance arts center and I show up backstage. It’s about two thousand seats. I look up the walls and big murals of the Lion King and Phantom and Wicked, and I go to the manager and I go, do you guys have comedy? Here and he goes, oh, yeah, I have comedy.
Sometimes we had Lewis Black and I go, oh, no, do you have security here? And he goes no, but we have ushers. And I’m like, you don’t understand. There’s going to be a crapstorm coming in here. My fans are gonna be rowdy.
And he’s like, we’ll be fine. And it’s like, now you don’t understand what I’m saying to you. The Nick Schwartz and crowd’s gonna come in hot. And he’s like, I’m not worried about it. Okay, whatever we go.
I do my show. It’s chaos. Girls got in a fight in a balcony. This brawl. People are being insane.
It’s super fun. I had a blast. And after the show, I got back to my green room and the manager goes, what the f And I’m like, yeah, I told you. People are doing cocaine in the crowd. There’s vomit everywhere.
Usher just didn’t know what to do and I’m like, yeah, I know, I told you. Literally said that. I called my agent. I was like, maybe let’s take a break from the Performing Arts Center. Like what am I gonna do?
After the ballet slates has a big article on the arts of clowning, a little too deep for me to cover on this podcast, but a good read on Slate. The part I’ll highlight here is they spoke to Natalie Palomides, who I think is fantastic, and the setup here was about how clown performers dress, and they said Natalie, by contrast, often isn’t dressed in anything. In one of her more shocking Bitsmedies takes the stage dressed like the little mermaid looking for her true love. An audience member of volunzear is to fill that role. Natalie locks them in an aggressive tongue and make out, pulling their shirt over their head with passionate post nuptial Gusto, writes Slates.
Later, Balamedes strips down completely and discovers that with the wonders of m enjoying yourself, maybe she doesn’t need true love after all. She says, so much of the clowning in the modern scene is naked and horny, and that’s not part of being a clown. Traditional clowning is supposed to be innocent, childlike, and playful, and I’m frustrated that I’ve become an example of this. It’s become a creature people. If you’re going to do nudity, you have to earn it.
She’s anxious that she might be bastardizing the form. She would rather say that I was a physical character comedian. I think more people on the outside started to refer to me as a clown before I called myself one. One of her friends made the case that clowning, just like any form of art, is subject to reinvention and deconstruction. Deal and went electric, Natalie, it might ditch your clothes in the middle of a show.
Leslie Lao is one of Vulture’s comedians you should know and will know. Oh. When they asked her if she were immortalized as a cartoon character, what would her outfit be? Interesting question? Stylish ath leisure, high waisted sweatpants, sports brawn a cool baggy vintage jacket, sexy clean sneakers.
Sounds like, uh, Pouci from The Simpsons, didn’t Pooci dress like that? What comedian’s career trajectory would you like to follow? Bill Burr? I want to do stand up forever if you known for that first, and be competitive with myself and see if it can be better than it was there before. I want everything I do outside of stand up writing, acting, podcasting, directing, voice over, et cetera.
Tolign with my voice in comedic style. Worst show ever. I recently did a show to college, so beforehand I assumed it was for college students. That is a good assumption. When I arrived, it was for a summer camp of high school students touring the college decide whether or not they wanted to apply.
The average age had to be sixteen. They spent the entire day doing activities and were restless. All of them were on their phones and either talking to each other, shouting at questions that the comics, or trying to make each other laugh. The sound was awful. They were too young to grasp the concepts of my jokes, loneliness, isolation, agonizing over whether or not to have children, et cetera.
They were not listening or laughing at anything I said, so I started doing Q and A. Questions range from what’s your favorite movie? Too? Does life get worse? To what’s your Snapchat?
The lineup was stacked with amazing and talented comics, and one by one we were demolished emotionally by these children, and I hated it and it was amazing. All right, what’s your joke writing process? She says, trying to be funny can backfire on me. When I first started, I naturally thought of what would make an audience laugh, and work backwards and tailoring the premise to it. Now I realize if I try to be funny first, my truth will get lost.
If I start with the truth first, and I rant about my honest feelings and experience off in the humor On Once he relies on its own organically all right, comedy opinion hill that you’ll die on, Leslie says, let’s experiment with earlier show times. Shows that start past nine pm are challenge to us all. Everyone’s pushing their limits to be awake and full of energy when reality we’re all fighting there to doze off. Amen, preach Johnny Maco’s to bed at nine point thirty half the time. Let me take a crack at a four pm show.
We can all have a laugh at dinner at a reasonable hour and tuck ourselves in by nine pm. Oh, I think that’s awesome, She says. I also love the no phones and shows policy. A stand up show is not a concert. It’s a time to listen and laugh.
When you’re holding up your phone in front of your face and block other people’s view and filming our sets, you’re neither listening or laughing. Best comedy advice, Worst comedy advice. Best, don’t try to lead with being relatable. Just focus on what’s true for yourself and hope that connects with people. Worst.
When I had my day job at Netflix, a few comics would find out and tell me that I was already in. All I had to do is get acquainted with someone on the stand up team and pitch myself and get a special that way, I’m well aware that’s a backward, awkward and unprofessional strategy. These industry people have to come to you. If the comics approach them, they’d be a line of comics of the Netflix lobby waiting to pitch themselves to creative executives every day. Just be so good, funny, professional and special that someone who can change your life will notice you and come to you.
And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it. They might like it too. You can share it on social media. You can follow me on social media.
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