Name: Roy Wood Jr. returns! | You Made It Weird!
Uploaded: 2025-01-22T15:00:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roy Wood Jr. returns! | You Made It Weird!' from Pete Holmes on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Roy Wood Jr. returns! | You Made It Weird!' from Pete Holmes on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-22. Transcript available.

Roy Wood Jr. returns! | You Made It Weird!

You made it weird. Yes, you did. You made it weird. You made it weird. With
Pete Holmes.
Yes, you did. You made it weird. What's happening, weirdos? This is the return
of Roy Wood Jr. He was
on the show, I don't know, seven, eight years ago? Long time ago. And I'm so
glad that he's back.
He is, as I tell him on the show, a day off. He has so many interesting things
to say,
so many funny things to say. I'm so glad you guys are here. This is a great
episode.
Check out Roy's new stand-up special. It is incredible. I'm not just saying
that. It is
fantastic. I laughed the whole way through. It's on Hulu. It's called Lonely
Flowers. Roy Wood Jr.
Check it out now. Don't wait. It's fantastic. And if you like stand-up comedy,
why not come see me?
Go to PeteHolmes.com for all my tour dates. We have Salt Lake City, Phoenix,
Los Angeles,
obviously once a month at Largo, Vancouver. We just added a second show for
Vancouver,
Austin, and Nashville. Hope to see you out on the road. We'll be adding more
dates on there as well.
So whenever you hear this, go to PeteHolmes.com and see when and where I will
be. So I hope to see
you out on the road. And thank you to everybody who's been coming out. In the
meantime, enjoy this
chat with the wonderful Roy Wood Jr. Get into it. First of all, it's really
great to see you. Second of all,
I loved your special. I watched it this morning. I fucking think it's dope. It's
dope. It really is
dope. I get so excited when I see somebody doing like a, like a craftsman, like
that does stand-up
comedy brilliantly. So it's really, really special. Yeah. Thank you, bro. No, I,
we'll, we'll go on and
on about that. Let me tell you, let me give you this premise that I can't make
work because it goes
back to cool edit pro in the nineties and early two thousands. You could just
be cool. Like you
could have sunglasses on and a jacket and lean on a Ferrari. And that was
counterculture. Yeah.
That was it. And now you look stupid. If you're being cool in that way, if you're
trying to be
cool, you look dumb, but you do like now it's like less effort is cool. You
should look like you're not
trying, but in remember Richard gear, Richard gear was just trying to be cool.
And it was working
in the nineties. It was like a dad's idea of what cool was in the seventies was
Richard gear in the
nineties. We were like charisma approved world's sexiest man. You're so right.
Cause you know how
the show business takes a couple of generations. Like you and I write a show
about high school.
We write it kind of like our high school. So people are watching a show about
high school in the nineties
that was made in the late 2020s. You know what I'm saying? So there's a delay.
So Richard gear was
the seventies idea of cool based on a guy who grew up in the seventies, writing
it for a guy who would
acted in the nineties. Yeah, exactly. Like that's what it is, man. And that
joke, I could see why that
would be difficult to infuse into people because there's so many layers of
instruction. It's hard.
What you're trying to do. I have an animal joke that I, I'm going to try later
on after the wildfires.
It might be too close to the tragedy, you know, but I, but I don't even have
the joke like laid out,
but the base premise, I have a friend who was unable to meet me for lunch when
I was in LA
because she adopted one of the animals that was displaced from the wildfires.
She's going through the paperwork process and what it is. And that's kind of,
and I was like, you know, they, they already have animals.
They're animals you could have got last week before the fires. So what makes
that animal special? And
okay, cool. Went through a trauma scooping them up. So that's the secret to
promoting animal.
Yeah. So that's the secret to promoting animal adoption. Then the next wildfire,
the LA humane society. Got to release all the animals in the path of the fire.
We have to turn these kinds of animals into survivors, but because people love
animals,
because the fires are still going on. And I also did the joke in LA about two
out,
two miles from a fire line, probably not the best timing, time tragedy plus
time. So I'm going to
rework that recipe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can feel that way. I, my, I
wouldn't call it a bit,
but I was just saying to Caroline and Katie, before you jumped on, I was like,
I'm having
funeral chat fatigue. You know, when you're at a funeral and it gets really old,
just saying how
tragic it is and how sad it is. And I'm talking about when people I love have
died, you get tired
talking about your uncle being dead. You know what I'm saying? And that's my
angle. But sometimes you're
like, maybe people aren't ready for the angle yet. You know what I mean? Like,
I don't know if I'm going to
do that on stage, but that is how we're feeling. That's like, that's like when
you whisper, you go,
Roy, it's kind of tiring being like, I know it sucks to everyone you see. Yeah.
Everyone you see.
You know what mine is? And this isn't a bit, and even if you want to run with
it,
run with it. But for me, my issue, and this is going to get dark,
dead comedian, comedian just died energy at the comedy club. Yeah. I get that.
Like I am for the people don't understand what I'm saying. When a comedian dies
tragically,
regardless the circumstance, pick, pick a death, pick a cause of death.
The comedy club is this place where we all kind of come to commit like that,
like out on TV,
when the cops all go to the bar after old Jimmy saved the kid, but died at the
end of the movie.
And so that energy, I'm, I'm emotionally exhausted on. This is a weird job
where the
longer you do it, the more dead people, the more dead coworkers you acquire.
And the idea of just
being, and it's weird because I'm 25. I started in 98, but you're seeing the
young comics three years,
four years in, and they're getting hit with death way more than I feel like you
and I did early on.
I feel like we got a death like every five to eight years. And then that gap
started closing more and
more. So yeah, I get what you're saying about the funeral chit chat. It's just
the energy of
trying to act like nothing's wrong. I'll add to that. Everybody's in shambles.
What I hated. And I remember when Bob Saget passed, this is the last time I saw
this. People would make
a really dark joke, a really dark joke about him, about whatever, and then go,
Bob would have loved it.
Bob would have loved that joke. And I'm like, first of all, he wouldn't because
it sucked. It was horrible.
Stop using a dead person's legacy to greenlight your terrible riff. He would
have loved it. He would have,
you said nothing. You just offended everybody. So you get it. Let's go back. I
want, I do want to talk
a little bit about your special. You know, it's funny, dude. I'm wearing, I
just filmed my special
in Portland and we're wearing very similar jackets.
Yellow. You did some yellow action. Mine's the khaki version of the same jacket
you're wearing.
Okay. Not quite right. Yeah. I do custom buttons,
which is so silly, but it's the one thing I like. So like the kind of, the magenta
buttons on my jacket
for my special, those aren't the, that's not off the rack. I, I buy it. It was
brown buttons. And then
I go to the stylist and I go put some motherfucking magenta on my shit, because
I want some flowers.
It was going to match. It was on the stage and shit. And I did that for my, the
special before this one,
I just put different color buttons on. I'm like, Oh, okay. I'll be the button
guy. That's a pro tip.
Little, little accent. There was the comedian I worked with, man, year one,
year two. I don't
even remember his name, Lou something, but he was the comic in the red shoes.
That was his thing.
Like that was his branding was just no matter what he wore ankles up, you
getting red shoes.
And that was going to be like his branding thing or whatever. He was, he was a
late night writer out
of LA, but I remembered that 25 years later and I go, fine. I get it. But it's
funny that you say
that dude, because I, I'm so glad I'm done with my special. I'd love to hear
about your experience
when you're done after the fact, I realized just how much thought and
consideration and really stress
I was carrying leading up to the filming of it. Cause you're going like a
normal show. I'm not like,
what shoes am I going to wear? And a special, I always think of Ellen. Ellen
did a special where
she was wearing blue sneakers. And I always remember that one as the blue sneaker
special. And I'm like,
well, what am I going to wear for this? Never worry about the length of my hair
or like even how fit
I am or what I'm wearing the stress. Did you experience that stress going into
that? I mean,
like you got a lot of production to nice theater. Did you feel under the gun to
get it right?
My issue was more the runway to shoot it. Lou Dick is his name. I want to give
respect to comedians.
We're going to edit that out. My issue was the amount of runway that I had to
shoot the special. So
I, who and I, we, we make the deal top of 2024 and we go, all right, we'll
shoot this at some point
this year. And my idea was the CNN show happened. I get the CNN contract in
like March and we're going
to launch in the fall. So I go to Hulu. Hey, um, I think I want to shoot the
special close to the
election. That way we can do it. And if the tone of the country's changing, I
will have the freshers,
whatever. And then the closer and closer we got that summer, I was like, I don't
know if I want
to be doing a CNN show for the first time and going out on the road on the
weekend and hosting. I mean,
you know, you're touring and hosting. You did that with the TBS back in the day.
It's psychopathic
behavior. And so dude, to quote your special, it's seven shotguns right there.
That's seven shotguns
right there. And that's how good your special is. There's so many good little
nuggets of language that
are so good. Anyway, keep going, bro. So I go back to Hulu and I'm like, can we
move this up a little
bit to the fall? And I only had three or four months of runway. The jokes were
already about 70%
there anyway. So let's just get in a blender for three months to go out on the
road hard every week
and really get the set tight and let's just shoot it and get it out of the way.
And then I can focus
solely on the CNN thing. And it actually worked out perfectly because the more
I started writing the
material, the less I wanted to be political. And the more I felt like, you know,
to your point about
joke development, I didn't want to do no more politics. Like I did that for
eight years in Daily
Show. I did three specials. If you want to hear me talk about race and reform
and equality and all of the
the letters and the coalitions, I just noticed that motherfuckers are lonely.
Everybody is just
miserable. How the fuck did that happen? Yeah. Okay. I'll do the special about
that. And that's
what it became. And so I'm glad that I didn't try to force any Joe and Kamala
material in there,
because now you get to January when you're finally airing. The political winds
change too much,
but loneliness and social abandonment. Oh, that's going to be around for a long
time. That's right.
And social media scoops you so fast, so fast. Like anything that happens, take
like the Will Smith
slap. The day, day one, it happens. Someone's going to get the bit. Someone's
going to get the angle.
You're not going to top it. That's my strategy. I'm like, don't even try. But
only two people,
only two comedians, in my opinion, did slap material that I feel like will be
evergreen past
the moment of the zeitgeist. Chris Rock himself and Marlon Wayans did a Netflix
special the year after
the slap. And the special was told from the point of view of him knowing all
three parties involved,
Will, Jada, and Chris. They're all his friends. So I'm like, oh, he's had a
front row seat for 20 years
and interacted. So his perspective is deeper than if that had been me. Motherfucker
wouldn't h