How Roy Wood Jr. Honed His Comedy Chops Waiting Tables at Golden Corral

In late 2023, Roy Wood Jr. decided to leave The Daily Show amid turmoil over who would host the long-running news comedy show on Comedy Central. It was only then he realized how grueling his schedule had been as a correspondent on the series. “You forget about how hard that job is,” he says. “So the idea of being able to dabble in a number of different things was very intriguing.”

So Wood Jr. jumped headlong into a slew of projects. He now hosts a CNN news comedy show Have I Got News For You; started writing a memoir; hosted an NPR podcast about civil rights and baseball in Birmingham, Ala., where he grew up; acted in two movies that may be released in 2025; hosted the All-MLB Awards; and filmed a new comedy special, Lonely Flowers, which releases Jan. 17 on Hulu.

In between his many obligations, Wood Jr. caught up with TIME to discuss his time in the food service industry, the impact of President Trump’s victory on satire, and whether the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a tougher room than the Apollo Theater. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

TIME: Why is your new comedy special on Hulu called Lonely Flowers?

RWJ: A group of flowers together is beautiful. But if you ever see a flower growing by itself, you go, Oh, what happened? As a society, we all somehow turned into a bunch of lonely flowers. A lot of the places we used to be connected were at stores, in lines, in conversations with cashiers. And that’s been replaced by touch screens, automated ordering, Doordash-ing.

You worked at the chain restaurant Golden Corral in college. What did you learn from that experience?

I feel like every American should either serve a year in the military or two years in food service. Both will give you differing perspectives on society and how to treat people and how fortunate you are. At Golden Corral, you serve everyone from eight-year-olds to 80-year-olds, from weird tables full of college kids to white supremacists. And you don't even realize the guy's a white supremacist 'til you see his white power tat on his knuckles as you're refilling his sweet tea for the third time.

When I started doing stand-up comedy, a lot of my jokes were two- or three-sentence greeting bits that I did earlier that day on shift. I could take a quick, little observational joke and by the end of my shift have it worded in a way that it works on any demographic. You start noticing that we do have a lot of things that connect us. That was a very, very special time in my life.

Speaking of your early career—have you noticed that some of your prank calls, from when you were on the radio in Birmingham, have been going viral on TikTok?

I have noticed that. There's a gang of people that made their own videos with them, and more power to them. As much sh-t as I used to bootleg when I was broke, this is my way of giving back to the ecosystem. It's cool to see.

It's an era of my life: I'm not going to do a new prank call album. My last prank CD came out in 2007, which is wild to think about. And I did a lot of them just for radio. So that's the thing that's fascinating about TikTok: they're finding sh-t that was never for sale.

How has TikTok changed prank culture?

Some prank culture now is short-attention-span theater. It’s not well thought out, and they’re out to make strangers look stupid, not themselves. If I didn’t laugh and there was no inherent attempt at laughter, you were just being rude to someone.

We're not in that same place of Punk'd, where it really was all in fun. With Jackass, very rarely are they embarrassing or messing with strangers.

Was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which you hosted in 2023, the toughest room you’ve ever played?

That dinner is tough, because no matter what, you probably will only have half the room. Because half of them don’t agree with the political lean of the joke, or they’re sitting with the person you’re making fun of.

But Amateur Night at the Apollo is the single most challenging performance any comedian could ever endeavor. When you walk on stage, you have none of the room. But if you do it right, you can have the entire room. I did an Amateur Night at the Apollo in ‘02 and essentially got booed. Sandman didn't come out, but I didn't advance. It wasn't good.

But at least they booed. At the Correspondents' Dinner, they stare. But we don’t have to worry about that for the next four years: I’m sure it’ll turn into some Trump yard sale for all of his merch on C-SPAN.

Does Trump winning make you happier or sadder that you weren’t tapped to host The Daily Show?

Trump’s win or loss doesn’t change our job as political satirists: to jump down the throat of what government is and isn’t doing right. I think the difference becomes figuring out a new way to get people who love Trump but ignore facts to pay attention to facts. If you still want to vote for him at the end of that analysis, cool. But there’s been a big disconnect between what is considered entertainment and what is considered news. And the public no longer cares about the difference so long as they’re entertained.

You’re in Outcome, an upcoming film starring Keanu Reeves. What did you learn from him on set?

He’s one of the most tactical actors I’ve ever worked with. It was masterful to watch him ask questions. You think that now these people that are good at whatever they do, there's nothing else to learn. But he was willing to take direction from co-star and director, Jonah Hill, every step of the way.

The fear is that if I ask the director something, he’ll think I’m stupid. But that’s not the case at all.

You recently hosted the All-MLB Awards. What can baseball do to increase its cultural relevancy?

Encourage players to play with some flair. The World Baseball Classic gets great ratings, and it’s this electric, festive atmosphere. Japanese baseball—that sh-t is like a college football game. Let players bat flip. Let them pimp walk after they strike you out.

Do you have any thoughts on Juan Soto’s $765 million deal with the Mets?

The Mets are either the smartest team in baseball, or they're about to look like the dumbest for a long time. And this is a team that's still paying off Bobby Bonilla.

I don't know where we are right now. We're giving baseball players over half a billion and college football players are staying in college an extra year because they're making more in NIL than they would as a rookie in the NFL. So it's a weird timeline.

In your special, you talk about the importance of understanding cycles of progress and backlash. What do you mean?

The more we can remember history, the more we can look at what’s happening now through a larger lens, and be a little bit more predictive of what’s coming. So the next time you make progress, then you know how to start building up your reserves to prepare for the backlash.