Comedy review: Roy Wood Jr. keeps it real, deftly mixing comedy and cultural critique on subjects from gun violence to anti-vaxxers
At Just For Laughs Vancouver, The Daily Show star offered the perfect act to see after a devastating week in the news
Roy Wood Jr.
Just for Laughs Vancouver runs to May 29
WITH HIS SUPERIOR ability to acknowledge pain while making people laugh their asses off, Roy Wood Jr. felt like the perfect comedian to spend an evening with after another horrific school shooting south of the border.
Returning to Just For Laughs Vancouver, the comedian and cultural commentator from The Daily Show With Trevor Noah dug meaningfully into complex subjects like American gun violence, anti-vaxxers, single fatherhood, and, of course, race relations. And he was clearly enjoying himself, telling the audience it was only his fourth live gig since the shutdown.
The show felt less like a series of constructed bits and more like just hanging with the guy. For those unfamiliar with Wood’s standout comedy specials (Father Figure, No One Loves You), and those who only know him from The Daily Show, his standup has a laidback flow—punctuated by killer double takes—that contrasts his TV style. Whereas Wood often plays a character on the late-night current-affairs sendup (his gruff, mustachioed CP Time is a favourite), he keeps it startlingly real alone at the mike.
Wood launched with a hilarious extended anecdote about eating his morning oatmeal and blithely Tweeting about Walmart’s new red-velvet-swirled “Juneteenth Ice Cream” (or “slavery ice cream”, as Wood dubbed it). That simple act instantly made headlines and thrust him into the role of leading a national campaign against it. (Walmart apologized and yanked the product—Google it if it sounds too outrageous to be true.) A brilliant commentator, Wood managed to contextualize the incident—which happened less than a week ago!—as a sign of people’s traumatized, hair-trigger state of mind these days. He also poked fun at his own possible unsuitability as an earnest civil-rights leader. It fully slayed the packed Vogue audience of young, diverse fans.
From there, the comic moved into even more loaded territory. An acknowledgement of the Texas school tragedy led to a less-expected bit on the ease of gun sales in the U.S. Counterintuitively, what makes Wood’s comedy so appealing and authentic is the way you can feel him still working through ideas; part of the sequence here found him trying to figure out a way you could make buying a gun as embarrassing as he felt purchasing condoms when he was a teen.
Wood also had notably fresh takes on the pandemic and anti-vaxxers south of the border. He prefaced it all with his own, again self-effacingly funny account of getting the virus twice—including the OG version that found him shivering alone in his house with the heat cranked to 90. His solution for people resisting the shot? Semantics. Don’t call it a vaccine; call it medicine—just look at all those drug ads on American TV channels to see how much folks love their medicine.
But the biggest revelations came in some of the most serious material of the night: a major bit about appearing on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, and having to process some pretty heavy family secrets in front of a camera. Wood’s ease weaving together that intense confessional storytelling (the ghost of his father looms large) with moments of comic relief shows a craftsmanship and care that belies the looseness of his delivery. That unique approach might come in part from his background in journalism (passed down from a father who covered the deaths of Black soldiers in Vietnam, then the civil-rights movement in the U.S.), mixed with a natural, no-holds-barred candour.
At a time when people are talking about who can joke about what in comedy, Wood proves that standup can be meaningful, relevant, and brutally honest—and still kill.
Vancouver comedian Julie Kim was a well-chosen opener—her dry and witty takes on this city’s increasingly intermixed cultures (including in her own household) a nice offset to Wood’s insights south of the border. (Note her cutting observation that the “Asian” is silent in BIPOC.)
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