Quick Take: Stand-Up Comedy in the Age of Cancel Culture
The Michael Steele Podcast
The Bulwark
4.8 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2023
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
Comedian Roy Wood Jr. joins The Michael Steele Podcast. Roy talks about how he approached the roast at the 2023 White House Correspondents' Dinner and what it's like doing stand up in the age of cancel culture.
Roy Wood Jr.'s live standup tour, “Happy to Be Here” is happening now across the U.S and Canada. Check out the full list of dates here: https://www.roywoodjr.com/
Follow Roy Wood Jr. @roywoodjr
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Follow the podcast @steele_podcast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Michael Steele podcast listeners, Michael Steele here with another quick take from the Michael Steele podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | Check out what's going on right now. |
| 0:16.6 | Welcome back everybody to Michael Steele podcast. |
| 0:18.6 | We got Roy Wood Jr. in the house. |
| 0:21.2 | Emmy-nominated comedian, he is correspondent on and writer and producer, radio personality, |
| 0:31.1 | the Daily Show, he's all those things. The Washington crowd, to begin with, is in large measure, |
| 0:42.0 | you're looking at a room full of overstuffed high priced |
| 0:45.8 | egotistical individuals who do not want to be made fun of, you know why? |
| 0:52.8 | Because they were made fun of in high school. |
| 0:55.0 | They were made fun of in college, right? |
| 0:57.6 | And so here you come up there reminding them |
| 1:00.1 | and flashing back to some hardened days for the of a lot of these folks. They take it so seriously. And I've watched, I've been at enough of those dinners over the years to just watch them just the joke not I mean I'm laughing the guy at the table across me is laughing but the other 3,000 people are sitting there kind of going like well that wasn't funny and that's because in the moment it struck a nerve in a way that they didn't like and that's not what the event is about so how do you kind of figure |
| 1:37.9 | out to make a good roast to do that right you got to put a little you got a you got a |
| 1:44.0 | marinate the meat every once in a while all right you got a mace you got your |
| 1:47.6 | onions and your carrots how do you put together a good roast when you know you've got an |
| 1:51.8 | audience that's already kind of looking at you with one eye. |
| 1:54.7 | So for the way I put together my correspondence, Dinnerset, the strategy and this was talking with my head writer Christiana and Bakway Medina. |
| 2:06.3 | What I felt like I was up against with that audience was that no one knows me as a standup. |
| 2:12.0 | You only know me if you know me as a daily show correspondent. |
| 2:17.0 | Right. That is not my comedy. That is a character and it's fine but it's not everything that I am |
| 2:28.6 | commutically so before I can be truly mean or do an edgy joke about something that I call it dynamite |
| 2:37.5 | before you start juggling dynamite it's like and I and this is a it's a perfect analogy for me. I learned so much in stand up from opening for magicians and that magic is about trust and you have to build trust which is why a magician |
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