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Roy Wood Jr’s latest special starts off with less of a joke and more of a rumination, “We ain’t gonna make it… Overall as a society, we’ve lost connection.” The comedian, known for nearly a decade of incisive political takes on The Daily Show, isn’t talking about Trump, or electoral politics at all. Instead, Lonely Flowers explores the ways both big (gun violence), and small (rude customer service interactions) society’s threads have frayed.
That’s not to say he’s stepped away from riffing on the news of the day — he hosts CNN’s Have I Got News For You, the American adaptation of the long-running UK series, alongside panelists Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black.
“The cool thing about having this is that they give us and I say us, I mean myself, Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin, they give us free rein to tell the jokes we want to tell. And in no shape or form are we beholden to anything that’s going on within the network,” Wood Jr. explains during our phone call.
As for where political comedy goes in the age of Trump 2.0, it depends on whether Trump does all of the awful things he’s promised to do. “I think where comedy goes with Trump is dictated on exactly how many of his policies he’s actually able to get through and how heinous they turn.
“You know, if we’re in week 1, it’s a gang of deportations and it’s ugly and it’s bad. Then I think the idea of just calling Trump crazy and silly, as a joke premise to operate from, I don’t really think that’s worth anything, because that hasn’t gotten us anything done to this point.”
But Lonely Flowers is more about documenting a larger cultural shift, and less about the nitty-gritty of the political world. “I just feel like after Covid, it wasn’t during Covid, it was after Covid ended. But I feel like we were just disconnected as people… I also deliberately didn’t talk about politics within the special. I wanted to talk about the state of society and people and where we are as human beings right now.”
Wood Jr. was a Daily Show correspondent for 8 years and a fan favorite to host the show following Trevor Noah’s departure, even before his acclaimed turn as host of the White House Correspondents Dinner. But as the indecision on Noah’s replacement dragged on, Wood Jr. decided to leave the show in 2023.
He didn’t have a plan lined up at the time. That uncertainty, he explains, just comes with the territory of being a comedian. “I had a radio show I got fired from on Twitter. It happens. I had a sitcom on TBS. Got a handshake from the head of the network that we were getting a fourth season. Two weeks later, found out we were canceled.
“So you know, the idea of fear or not knowing what I’m gonna do next, the only difference between my Daily Show departure and other moments in my career where I’ve had unassuredness is that at least I got to choose this time.”
Lonely Flowers dropped on Jan. 17 and is streaming on Hulu. You can also stream ‘Have I Got News for You’ on Max the day after it airs with the Disney+/Hulu/Max Bundle.
