Entertainment
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 Saturday, the comedian will make 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.
Roy Wood Jr. says the show is “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.”
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
“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, Ala., 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.
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
(Oliver Farshi / For The Times)
“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.”
It’s summer blockbuster movie season and there have been a lot of new releases from many of the biggest studios and directors. Some of the biggest titles include “Supergirl”, “Disclosure Day”, and “Toy Story 5.”
GBH’s Morning Edition guest host Tori Bedford spoke with GBH correspondent and film critic Sarah G. Vincent, along with GBH’s Callie Crossley, an avid cinephile and host of Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, for their take on some of the season’s biggest releases. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
SUPERGIRL
Tori Bedford: So one of the biggest movies to hit theaters lately has been the next installment in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, “Supergirl”, starring Millie Alcock. Sarah, let’s start with you. What did you think?
Sarah G. Vincent: I actually loved it. It’s the first summer movie where I didn’t have any disclaimers of “I liked it but…” I was very invested in the storyline because if someone hurt my fluffy baby, I would run around the universe and try to save him. Also, I like that it was like a superhero movie with a woman where she didn’t become a surrogate mother, where she wasn’t sexualized, where she was dealing with real emotion. The real emotion really hit me. I love the backstory. It was gorgeous. I understand that it’s a lot of jokey jokes.
Bedford: What do you mean jokey jokes?
Vincent: On the present day storyline where she’s helping Ruthye, they do try to keep it light because they’re dealing with a lot of heavy issues, and so there are a lot of like flippant jokes and one-liners and everything. And I didn’t mind that because this is still a blockbuster and I think that a blockbuster does need to have some like mass appeal. I’m not going for a Bergman film, right?
Bedford: Yeah, it’s summer. Like, chill out.
Vincent: Right.
Bedford: What’d you think, Callie?
Callie Crossley: I am the “but” — I liked it except some of the themes were so heavy, even though presented in an entertaining way. So, don’t take me wrong. You should see it. It’s a popcorn movie. But I was like, “OK…”
Bedford: You wanted more jokey jokes.
Crossley: Well, it was just to me, I looked at it and I thought, “Epstein Files” because we have a plot of young girls being trafficked to an island of crazy men. So that’s what came to me. But then I thought, I guess I’m just— I live in news, so this is what I would think of. But I can understand in the moment why it was there, but I’m not sure it resolved itself for me in the best way possible that sort of made it maybe not so uncomfortable about it. Now, she is great, Millie Alcock as Supergirl, and I loved her backstory. I really enjoyed that part. And there are some cameos from Superman. So you really get to see the difference between the two of them and why there is a difference, because now you know the backstory.
Bedford: I love their relationship, where he’s like, “This is why Krypto is not well-behaved” and she’s all disorganized.
DISCLOSURE DAY
Bedford: All right, next up — I can’t wait to talk about this. Steven Spielberg is back with an alien mystery thriller, “Disclosure Day.” This man is obsessed with aliens.
Callie, let’s start with you. What’d you think?
Crossley: I went because it’s Steven Spielberg, and I wanted everything. So again, this is a popcorn movie, and out of the gate, you are really on a ride, and you’re like, “What’s happening?” So, I would say the first part of the movie, you’re just caught up in trying to understand where he’s going with it, and it’s a lot of action, and it’s Spielberg-esque in that way. And that John Williams score is fabulous. What I had a problem with was the end of it. I’m going to use the word unimaginative because I am not giving away the plot, so no spoilers here, It’s unimaginative in how he resolves it because I think it’s old-fashioned in both how he presents some of the folk, and also in the methodology of how he wants to get the word out. So that sort of threw me off and I’m thinking, “That’s not a word I use with Steven Spielberg. I should not be using unimaginative.” I still say you should see it, but those are my thoughts.
Vincent: At 2.5 hours, I would say, I warned you. So as an action movie where people are being chased, like the bad guys are chasing the good guys, it’s a great movie. As a movie where it takes an alternate sort of sci-fi approach to the idea of possession and what it would look like, terrific. Actually, a really provocative, wonderful idea. Emily Blunt does a wonderful job.
Crossley: Fabulous.
Bedford: She’s great in the movie.
Vincent: I think she owns the movie, and if the movie was just about her character, I would probably give it like closer to a 90 than where I landed, which was probably in the 70s.
Bedford: I was just going to say … I got out of this, and I thought, “Am I stupid? Or was this really dumb?” It was fun though.
Crossley: This is not a Spielberg movie you’re going to remember, I say.
Vincent: No, yeah, you’re not.
Crossley: And there’s a lot of reviewers saying it’s fabulous. And I’m like, were we at the same place?
Bedford: Am I dumb?
Crossley: But still, it’s a popcorn movie. Got some really good stuff in there you could enjoy.
TOY STORY 5
Bedford: All right, finally: Woody, Buzz, and all their friends are back again for “Toy Story 5,” and this one is taking on big tech as a teaching tablet enters the toy box. Sarah, what’d you think?
Vincent: I loved it. It’s my favorite Toy Story. And I would say that what I loved about this movie is when you go to movies, usually technology is the bad guy, period. And this movie is much more nuanced. And no one is really the bad guy. It presents the pros and cons of everything. And it’s about authentic relationships and it shows how in the past, a relationship without technology was fraught, in retrospect, with problems for Jesse, with the trauma she endured by losing her person. Now in the present with their new human basically having this crisis of “how do I make friends?” So I think it shows the universal problem of how you make authentic relationships, and the technology is only showing how that problem persists. It embodies now, but it’s always been a problem.
Crossley: I think it’s brilliantly done in this way. It doesn’t demonize all the folks that usually get demonized. The tech gets demonized. Sometimes the parents get demonized. That did not happen at all. But for me, any story about friendship that’s told authentically is going to get me. And they know how to get you. It’s a really, really important story about finding your tribe, as Sarah said. Now, having said that, it’s still not my favorite. Toy Story 3 is my favorite. And I went back just to say, “Okay, let me just go look at the end of 3 again to see if I had the same response.”
Bedford: Oh, masochist, my God.
Crossley: Well, because I just wanted to see. I looked at my computer, watched only the end, and sobbed yet again.
Bedford: I know, that’s all I’ve got to say about this franchise. How much more crying do you want me to do?
Crossley: I misted up at the end of this. I did not sob, as I scared the children in 3 before in the theater. But this time I did mist up because really, they know how to get you. It’s so worth seeing.
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Controversial AI actor Tilly Norwood will star in her first movie, a comedy drama called “Misaligned.”
The film portrays Tilly as an AI being with “no real body” and lived experience but with access to everyone else’s, according to Particle 6, the London-based company behind Norwood.
Norwood drew intense ire from many Hollywood actors last year, when an executive behind her creation said Norwood would soon be signed to a talent agency. Some actors worried that AI characters trained on human likenesses without permission or compensation could one day replace them in movies and shows.
Particle 6 emphasized that the movie is a “hybrid production” with film and TV professionals working with AI specialists.
“Our ambition with Tilly Norwood has always been to show the creative industry what is possible with AI at any one point in time,” said Eline van der Velden, Particle 6 chief executive in a statement. der Velden said the film will help traditional filmmakers “upskill and transition to a world where AI will play an increasingly important part.”
“We remain passionate about helping people develop AI skills that will ensure they – and the industry – continue to thrive,” der Velden said.
In “Misaligned,” the plot progresses when Tilly is later convinced by a rogue bot to ignore her guardrails and start developing ambitions of her own, which make her more human and famous, and “Tilly begins to develop shame that her very being has been built on the whole of humanity,” Particle 6 said.
“The film will absolutely be funny, chaotic and self-aware — very Tilly,” van der Velden said in a statement. “But underneath it, there’s something deeper about identity, performance, and our very human fears around AI. And yes, art will most definitely be imitating life.”
AI remains a controversial topic in Hollywood, as many people in the entertainment industry are preparing themselves for the way the technology will change jobs and the way things are done. AI companies have touted how their tools could lower the cost and the amount of time it takes to produce visual effects . Meanwhile, writers and actors have expressed worries about their work being misused to train AI models.
“They are taking our professional members’ work that has been created, sometimes over generations, without permission, without compensation and without acknowledgment, building something new,” SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin said last year regarding the controversy surrounding Tilly Norwood.
“But the truth is, it’s not new. It manipulates something that already exists, so the conceit that it isn’t harming actors — because it is its own new thing — ignores the fundamental truth that it is taking something that doesn’t belong to them,” Astin said.
SAG-AFTRA did not immediately return a request for comment on Tilly’s first movie.
The union has been advocating for more AI protections for actors, recently approving a contract with major studios in which producers agreed to “a principle strongly favoring human performances” and that producers would only use a synthetic if it “brings significant additional value to the motion picture.” If a producer decided to use a synthetic in a role that could be done by a human, they would need to notify the union and bargain in good faith.
SAG-AFTRA is also supporting the NO FAKES Act, a federal bill that would give individuals the authorization to use their own voice and likeness in digital replicas and creates a way to hold bad actors liable.
The Fetus, 2025.
Directed by Joe Lam.
Starring Bill Moseley, Lauren LaVera, Julian Curtis, Evan Towell, and Ariel Yasmine.
SYNOPSIS:
A couple become pregnant with a half-human, half-demonic fetus with a thirst for blood-and must uncover its terrifying origins before it’s too late.
In The Fetus, Alessa (Lauren LaVera) discovers she has accidentally gotten pregnant by her boyfriend Chris (Julian Curtis), but instead of this being a cause for celebration Alessa tells Chris that they must visit her father Maddox (Bill Moseley) instead of going to a hospital as Maddox insisted she do that if she ever got pregnant. Chris has his own reasons for not wanting a baby and goes along with her, but Maddox is not an easy man to get to know as he is blind and suffering from PTSD as a result of being in Vietnam.
However, there are bigger stakes here than just trying to impress your girlfriend’s father as it is revealed that Alessa’s baby is the result of a pact Maddox made with a demon decades before, and that his blindness was due to him not sacrificing Alessa to that demon. Now he has a second chance to appease the demon with the vampiric tentacle monster that keeps appearing to suck the blood of anyone who isn’t kin, and Chris has to step up and decide whether he wants to be a father or not.
Or something like that, as The Fetus is a little confused by its own mythology. Taking its cue from Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive!, The Fetus is a low-budget indie affair that has its star names to thank for lifting it up and out of the bin marked ‘utter nonsense’ and into the realms of watchable nonsense. What’s the difference? Well, there is no way to try and sell it as a serious horror movie as the premise is totally daft, the visuals give it the look of a Megadeth music video from the 1990s and it ties itself up in knots trying to tell us who needs to be sacrificed and why (although neither become very clear by the end of it), but Bill Moseley has made enough of these types of schlocky horror movies to know exactly what he’s doing and how to pitch it, plus Lauren LaVera has enough clout with modern horror audiences to give it some appeal and she proves once again why she is one of the best scream queens of recent times (although she is better than this movie), and so the combination of these two actors gives The Fetus more weight than it would have had if two lesser-known actors were in the roles.
Julian Curtis as Chris also lends an air of comic relief, although when the plot is as silly as it is you cannot help but deliver your lines with that sort of sarcastic smirk on your face (”You can’t get pregnant overnight” – well, she did and no one questions it). He plays off against Bill Moseley very well and, if nothing else, his character is the one that has the biggest arc, and if you wanted to dig deeper and salvage some sort of message about nature versus nurture, what it means to be a father, telling your girlfriend when the condom splits and that type of thing then it is there, but don’t stress too much if you just want to watch vampiric tentacles coming out from between Lauren LaVera’s legs because that is really what everyone is here for rather than social commentary.
The Fetus works because everyone involved knows exactly what kind of movie they are making, and that movie is a low-budget black comedy about a demonic baby with naff-but-passable effects and three lead performers who bounce off each other very well. Going into it expecting The Exorcist or The Omen levels of filmmaking quality is only going to lead to anger and disappointment, and you can’t really be angry at a movie that has a man sticking his you-know-what into a fiery hole in the floor to conceive a baby. Temper your expectations and go into The Fetus prepared to enjoy 84 minutes of diabolical baby B-movie hilarity and you’ll have a good time… maybe.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
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