White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Roy Wood Jr. Talks About What Worked, What Got Left Out & Whether He’d Do The Gig Again
01.05.2023 - 22:41
/ deadline.com
Right up until he took the lectern at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this past weekend, Roy Wood Jr. was texting with his writers, making revisions.
Gone from his set: a joke about Rupert Murdoch. Too close to a well-received joke just used by President Joe Biden.
Added: A line about Anthony Fauci, inserted after Wood was informed that the doctor was an attendee in the Washington Hilton ballroom.
On Monday, Wood spoke to Deadline about how he pulled off one of the hardest gigs in comedy – performing before the 2,600 journalists, politicos and CEOs packed into the cavernous space. The reviews have been very positive, no easy feat considering the influential audience at the ready to scrutinize and judge. It also wasn’t always immediate apparent whether many in the crowd found a joke funny: With C-SPAN cameras trained on crowd reaction, some reporters were extra cautious about not guffawing too much at any one line, lest they be caught breaking standards of objectivity.
“It was a constant process of just putting stuff together,” Wood said of his performance.
Best known as a correspondent for The Daily Show, Wood described a weeks-long process to hone the material, 90% much of which was tried out at the Comedy Cellar in New York and then in a drop-in at D.C. Improv on Friday evening.
Some material was so specific to the event that he had to rely on blind faith that it would work. That was true about his first line, directed at Biden: Real quick, Mr. President. I think you left some of your classified documents up here, as he started to hand POTUS a sheet of paper.
Wood was given no advance word of the president’s remarks, as is tradition at the event, he said.
At the dinner, Biden quipped of the