Before he headlined the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Roy Wood Jr solicited advice from Hasan Minhaj, Michelle Wolf and other Daily Show alums who have landed the gig. They all told him the same thing: don’t have any regrets. But more than a week after his 25-minute set, Wood is still grappling with a bridge bit he did on mass shootings. “Drag queens are not at the school to groom your kids,” he intoned three minutes in. “And even if they were, most of them kids [are] going to get shot at school; it ain’t no problem.”
As groans filled the air, he further prodded the lawmakers in the room to “pass legislation” if they couldn’t take his joke – a callback to Barack Obama’s “don’t boo, vote”. The joke sparked even stronger backlash outside the room, with many dismissing Wood as the most insensitive agent of wokeness yet. That it was followed by another mass shooting in Texas days later didn’t help – but it certainly made his point. “There are always going to be people who will use any opportunity to misconstrue a joke for political points, which some people are doing with that joke online,” he tells me, a little defensively, over the phone.
