Roy Wood Jr.’s ‘Have I Got News for You’ is ‘a chance to live within the jokes first’

When Roy Wood Jr. played sports in high school, he spent a lot of time warming the bench — an experience that primed him for a career in comedy.

“Your job as a bench warmer is to come up with the heckles against the other team. I took pride in writing insults to hurl at other 15-year-olds,” Wood recalled in a recent Zoom interview. “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 O.”

There on the sidelines, Wood discovered he was funny, a talent he has been honing relentlessly in the decades since. After years of nonstop touring, Wood’s elusive big break arrived in 2015, when he became a correspondent on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” His wry sense of humor and sharp takes on issues like race and criminal justice made him a standout on the late-night program known for launching comedic talent. But shortly after a well-received turn as emcee at the White House Correspondents Dinner last year, Wood announced he would be leaving “The Daily Show.” The news, which came amid a messy and protracted search to find a host to replace Trevor Noah, who stepped down in 2022 after seven years at the desk, was a blow to fans who considered him the ideal successor.

It didn’t take long for Wood to land on his feet, however: On Sept. 14, the comedian made his debut as the host of “ Have I Got News for You,” a panel show on CNN that will take on the week’s headlines and attempt to fill a void in the topical comedy landscape.

An American update on the BBC show of the same name — a fixture on British airwaves since 1990 — “Have I Got News for You” will feature guests from the world of politics and entertainment competing in a fast-paced news quiz. Joining Wood are fellow comedy veterans Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin, who are rival team captains. While comedy panel shows are an institution in the U.K., the closest equivalent in the United States might be the NPR quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.” “Have I Got News for You” will take on current events, but with a lighter, more nimble touch, Wood said.

“We get to be in a very interesting piece of real estate in between, say, a Jimmy Fallon and a ‘Daily Show,’ “ said Wood, as he alternated sips of two smoothies, one a fruity pink, the other a healthy green. “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.”

After so much time at “The Daily Show,” where every piece, no matter how silly, advanced a political point of view, Wood is looking forward to cutting loose.

“The burden of making the argument every single time is not on my shoulders anymore,” he said. “It’s a chance to live within the jokes first, the opinions second.”

For Wood, the intersection of news and entertainment is familiar terrain. He studied broadcast journalism at Florida A&M University, a historically Black school, and his father, Roy Wood Sr., was a pioneering radio reporter known for his coverage of the civil rights movement and Black platoons in Vietnam, who co-founded the first Black radio network.

Yet Wood also gravitated to comedy from a young age, watching movies by the Zucker brothers and Nickelodeon shows like “You Can’t Do That on Television” and “Clarissa Explains It All.” When the cable company in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, got Comedy Central, he discovered stand-up comedy, but it wasn’t until he was in college that he decided to give it a try. He started with open mic nights at nearby Florida State “so if I bombed, I could come back to the quaint quietness of my own campus.”

After graduating, instead of pursuing a job in journalism, he was hired as a morning radio host at the Birmingham station where his father had once worked. Because he was replacing comedian Rickey Smiley, whose prank phone calls were popular with listeners, Wood was forced to master the art too. “I did what I could to make them very effective, not realizing that in hindsight, those prank calls were the perfect training ground for man on the street interviews at ‘The Daily Show,’” he said.

He continued to hit the road and perform stand-up around the country. Wood’s early comedy was not very political, but as he grew older he began to explore socially conscious themes that were “innately buried in my subconscious,” he said, as a result of his upbringing in Southern, Black communities.

“The more hip you become to what’s going on in the world, you go, ‘Wow, this is what my dad was talking about. The government doesn’t care,’” he said. “All of those speaking engagements that I used to attend with my dad, where I was just in the back of the room playing my Game Boy and not paying attention, he was actually talking about some real stuff. That started becoming more evident in my work. Once I got ‘The Daily Show,’ I had to concede that I’m just a funnier version of my father.”

Wood joined “The Daily Show” just as the South African Noah was taking over for Jon Stewart, infusing the celebrated late-night show with a younger, more diverse, global perspective on the news. Wood’s tenure began a few months after Donald Trump announced his first run for the White House, overlapped with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and Jan. 6 insurrection. It was, to say the least, a complicated time to be making political comedy.

“The biggest thing I learned from watching Trevor Noah is to not 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,” he said.

Wood recalls the episode taped on the day when the officer who killed Philando Castile was found not guilty. “I remember Trevor allowing not anger but compassion to drive the segment. As I recall, there wasn’t a single joke in that first act,” he said. “He just spoke sincerely to camera about where we are as a country. There were so many moments where Trevor could have used that pulpit to cuss America out, and he never did it, but instead he used calmness as a more precise scalpel.”

Noah abruptly left in late 2022, and a rotation of guests hosts, including Wood, auditioned to become his replacement. When it became clear that one-time front-runner Hasan Minhaj wasn’t going to get the job, Wood started to worry that there was no plan for “The Daily Show” as it headed into an election year — and as massive changes were underway at Comedy Central’s parent company, Paramount Global. “At that point, Jon Stewart coming back was not in the conversation,” he said. “For me, it felt like, ‘What is life going to be like for me after ‘The Daily Show’? If they pick somebody that doesn’t want me as a correspondent, then what am I going to do next year?’”

He figured, “if I’m gonna have to eventually find a place to land, I should just start that process now.”

“Have I Got News for You” arrives at a moment of contraction for topical humor on TV, as networks scale back on the political programming that boomed during the Trump administration. But “Have I Got News for You” aims to fill a void for shows that fall in the middle ground between pop culture and politics. “We’re trying to discuss things that have stakes without putting stakes on them,” said Wood, noting that the show will tape Fridays, giving it an edge on late-breaking news.

“Roy is not a reporter, and he’s not a newscaster, but he certainly could be. He just happens to be hilarious,” said Ruffin, who hosted her own late night show on Peacock for three seasons. “Roy knows every current news story, but also the history of them, which is amazing to me. Even when you think, ‘Oh, well, he’s not gonna have the back story on this,’ he does.”

“Roy has a kind of gravitas. He feels like he belongs in that chair,” said Black, praising Wood’s ease as a comedian. “He just feels like a dude you might be hanging out with around the grill at a barbecue, whereas I’m the a— who’s going to be like, ‘Do you have impossible burgers?’ “

Wood has been preparing by taking notes on Steve Harvey on “Family Feud,” because he is “the king of hearing something ridiculous, pausing and reacting to it and then getting the game back on track.” As for dream guests, he wants to book as many sitting politicians and newsmakers as possible, and hold them accountable — in a funny way. As he puts it, “Let’s laugh at the emperor for having no pants, and then let’s invite the emperor’s tailor on and find out, ‘Why did you not give any pants to the emperor?’ “

And while he’s excited about “Have I Got News for You,” he’s keeping an open mind about the future.

“If ‘The Daily Show’ called, I’m not going to send them to voicemail,” he said, “but I am dating someone.”