- 2 weeks ago
Comedian and actor Roy Wood Jr. talks about raising a son despite missing his own father, with his signature wit and sophisticated humor.
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00:00Now we have a very special panel with a very special guest.
00:04I'd like to introduce comedian, actor, author, and father, Mr. Roy Wood Jr.
00:26Roy Wood Jr.
00:28How you doing?
00:29I'm good. I'm good.
00:29I'm good, brother.
00:30Thank you all for taking a break from all that walking in the heat.
00:33Good to see y'all.
00:35We appreciate you.
00:36So today we're going to be talking about your book, and I think it's really dope,
00:41and it really is going to resonate with a lot of people because I lost my father at a young age, too.
00:45And I saw myself being mentored by a lot of my godfathers, my friends and everything like that.
00:51So talk to me about the name of your book and how you landed on it.
00:54So my pops died when I was 16 of prostate cancer.
00:59And in that time, you know, I didn't have a—like, I was 16 when my dad died.
01:05I was 37 when I had my first child, well, my only child.
01:09And so I have my son, and you start thinking about all of the lessons and all of the things that you're going to teach him,
01:15and then you start thinking, well, how was I taught that?
01:17And the more I thought about the lessons and the value system that I have as a man now,
01:22a lot of that was not taught to me by my father because he just wasn't here to give me that game.
01:27And so the more I reflected on that, the more I started coming up with just all of these people and all of these stories.
01:33And I'm literally sitting there in the delivery room, and I'm like, damn, I got to write all this down for him.
01:40And, you know, I hate to say this as well, but as a black man, you also have a sense of mortality.
01:47And you don't know when you're going to be gone.
01:50We know the day is coming.
01:52And so the idea of my son having to exist with that same deficiency, if you will, in my absence,
02:01should I pass before he's old enough for me to give him the game personally?
02:05Let me figure out a way to put all of this down.
02:07And the more I started putting stuff down, the more it felt like a book.
02:10And I just decided to try and get it sold as a book.
02:13And then I quit The Daily Show like a lunatic, and I was like, I really got to sell this damn book because I need a couple dollars.
02:23But it was really inspired by my father's death and my son's birth.
02:29This was not something I even thought twice about as a man until I had a child.
02:33And then I was like, okay, well, what type of values am I trying to pass on, not only to my son, but to other people?
02:40So did you have any people or a person in specific that was unexpected that may have taught you a lesson in life?
02:47Yeah, there were a lot of people because you start reflecting on your life.
02:53And I think the thing that was really unexpected for me was the idea that there are some people that you meet only once and they have a lifetime impact on you.
03:03There are people in this book, there's people who didn't make the book that I've known my entire life and that they mean the world to me.
03:09And there's probably some lessons in there, but there were single, singular people.
03:14You know, when I was doing stand-up comedy, when I first started, I slept in my car for the most part on off days.
03:22You had a Tuesday in Louisville, and then you had a Friday in Denver.
03:27I'm not going back to Birmingham for a couple days.
03:29I'm going to figure it out somewhere on I-70 on the way.
03:32And so what I would do during the day is work day labor.
03:35So any daily work, daily pay job I could pick up, I would work there.
03:40And it was a lot of the black men on those jobs that gave me game.
03:45Because I'm 19, I'm 20 years old, and I'm working around 40 and 50-year-old men, and that first question is, well, what the hell are you doing here?
03:53You supposed to be at McDonald's.
03:54What the hell are you doing here?
03:55And we're talking like we're laying concrete, we're pouring tar, like stuff that I know you need a certification for that I was not certified for.
04:05They don't give a damn.
04:06Man, I was out there driving a forklift at 20.
04:08I ain't got no CDL.
04:11But the idea of what drove this young brother to this place, and then you start chopping it up with these men, and you start realizing that, to a degree, they viewed me as a younger version of themselves.
04:24And they saw it as an opportunity to try to give me a way to divert me.
04:28And I told a story specifically about one of those brothers from one of those day labor jobs in the book, but that was one of the ones, when I really sat back and reflected, there were a ton of black men who on those work jobs would just give me a quick little piece of advice and get right back to work.
04:44And that's where I really feel like, to a large part, mentoring helps.
04:51We need mentorship programs.
04:52I have a younger brother that does mentorship for 13 to 18-year-olds in Birmingham.
04:56But fatherhood is also these microscopic moments of advice.
05:01It may be a quick moment where your kid asks you something, and it's not some big, long, drawn-out activity.
05:07But, you know, for me, a lot of my coworkers were people who gave me game.
05:13And it may have been somebody positive like that, but I also told a story in the book.
05:17I had a coworker that snorted cocaine.
05:19He was an amazing coworker.
05:21Learned something from him.
05:24Also, don't do drugs.
05:25But also, he was really good at his job on drugs.
05:31So, you know, it was all of these moments where, more often than not, I feel like also subconsciously, I was seeking out male mentorship, you know.
05:45You know, I mention my mother in a book, of course, because my mother and father didn't get back together until I was in the fourth grade.
05:50So, my mom was my father for that front half of my life, as best she could be.
05:54But what I noticed later on in my life as a teenager and going into my 20s and my 30s was that I sought out men more so than I did women.
06:05I had a wonderful network of black women who were always there to help me.
06:10But more importantly, I had my mom.
06:12So, if I really needed a specific thing or a guidance, I was more inclined to look for that at the house.
06:17But when it came to male mentorship and guidance, I did not have that in my life.
06:23So, I kind of actually wanted to hone in on the writing process, too, because you've worked in so many different creative spaces, TV, podcasts, stand-up.
06:31How do you think writing a book stretched you in ways that those other platforms didn't?
06:35You can't be funny all the time in a book.
06:39Everything else I've ever done professionally, the first objective is to be funny.
06:44You can be informative and you can speak about the issues.
06:47Even with Daily Show, we touched on Chicago gun violence.
06:51We talked about Cop City and Atlanta.
06:53My second piece at the Daily Show was the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.
06:58It was all relevant stuff, but it's got to be funny.
07:01What's funny about it?
07:02So, the jokes have to be funny.
07:04The podcast has to be engaging.
07:05Whereas, when you're writing a book, your job is to be as open and honest and emotionally naked about what you're feeling because you don't know what other people are going through that or what other people are feeling that.
07:18And you're looking to connect through emotion more so than a punchline.
07:23I know your father, he had a background in the civil rights movement, activism, correct?
07:28Correct.
07:29Yeah, journalism.
07:31Pretty much anywhere black folks were struggling, my daddy was there with a tape recorder reporting the issues.
07:37How do you carry his legacy with you today?
07:39I think a lot of what I do is just exactly that.
07:43For the people who don't know, my father was the co-founder of the National Black Network, which at the time, in the late 60s, early 70s, was the precursor to any serious level of black media that was dedicated solely to giving black news from a black point of view.
08:00You know, Sirius XM has a lot of that now.
08:02You know, people kind of can say that about what black Twitter is at times, but at that time, there was not a syndicated series of radio reporters dedicated solely to covering and reporting black issues.
08:15My father was an embedded reporter in Vietnam, the civil rights issues in South Africa and Soweto.
08:22My father was in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia during their civil war.
08:26My pops covered every, pretty much any riot from the 60s till Rodney King, my father was there.
08:35And so he was a very serious man.
08:37So serious, in fact, this ain't even in the book, but my dad hired Don Cornelius and got Don Cornelius in the radio.
08:45Don Cornelius, before he became of Soul Train fame, he was a cop in Chicago.
08:49He pulled my pops over, my pop said, you got a nice voice, and Don said, that ain't gonna get you about this damn ticket.
08:58And my dad gave him a job.
09:00My dad gave Don Cornelius a job at WVON as a news reporter, and from that, Don Cornelius got bit by the media bug, radio led to television, everything that you know today.
09:09And, in fact, my pops was one of the people that fronted Don Cornelius some of the money to shoot the pilot for Soul Train.
09:15And this is how serious my dad was about black liberation, was that Don came back to my father.
09:23For those of you that don't know the Soul Train story, Don Cornelius borrowed a bunch of money.
09:26He shot the pilot.
09:28Nobody would air it, so he couldn't get his money back to pay back his investors.
09:31He goes to some of the investors and goes, instead of me paying you back, how about you just be a producer and make money off Soul Train for the rest of your life?
09:42To which my dad told Don Cornelius, don't nobody want to watch Negroes dance for an hour.
09:50Give me back my thousand dollars.
09:54And Don paid my pops back, and my pops signed away any part of the Soul Train, like, legacy or whatever.
10:01And part of that was because when you think about the time when Soul Train was ideated, it was terrible for black Americans.
10:08And it was assassination after assassination, riot after riot, march after march.
10:14So the idea of, hey, man, disco's happening, we need to be, my dad could not, he was locked in.
10:21And so when you talk about me and my father's legacy, I've tried to, I benefit from the sacrifices he made.
10:34And so, yeah, I grew up west side of Birmingham, but the advantage I had is that I grew up, everything was black.
10:42Birmingham is 70% black.
10:44It's no different than Detroit, it's like New Orleans.
10:46So I grew up around positive black imagery with black people doing shit and getting things done.
10:51And so the shadow of oppression wasn't as prominent as it was.
10:57It was there, but, you know, racism moves sinister, moves underneath in the 80s and 90s.
11:02So it gave me the freedom to be a little happy.
11:05So I could crack a joke.
11:06I could have a sense of humor.
11:08I could be a little looser than my dad.
11:10But as I got older, I started realizing I care about the same things.
11:12I care about the same issues.
11:14I still want to fight for the same causes.
11:15But for me, it was important to figure out how to make it funny, to give it an entry point so that some people may want to listen.
11:23So that's interesting, though.
11:24I kind of wanted to stay here with that.
11:26You know, your father's journalism background, his connection to Diane Cornelius and everything he's done for the Civil Rights Movement.
11:32I know you said that's something that you didn't put in the book, but that was like an amazing story.
11:36You know, how did you choose what to put in the book and what to keep out?
11:39It just had to all tie back to a lesson.
11:42It had to tie back to a value.
11:43And I think at the end of the day, we all have interesting stories.
11:47And if we all sit back and reflect upon our lives, we'll all find all of these random fathers and random mothers that you didn't even think you got a lesson from.
11:56First thing I have to do is just sit down and assess, well, who am I?
11:59What do I believe?
12:00What are the things that I don't want my son to do?
12:03And it could be something as simple as standing up for yourself, standing up to a supervisor.
12:08Okay, well, when have I ever stood up to a supervisor?
12:11And you literally have to go through your head and then you go, oh, yeah, it was a time in the car with the older black comic.
12:17And he cussed out a white booker on the phone with me in the car.
12:21And I had never seen anybody just talk to white people like that before in my life.
12:26Because in entertainment, you're taught that whoever is deciding whether or not they want to choose you, they have lord over you.
12:33They have power over you.
12:34These people do not.
12:36But when you're young and you're 18, 19, and you start in stand-up, you think that every gatekeeper, don't piss them off.
12:43It's a million gates.
12:46It's a million doors you can go knock on.
12:48And the way the younger people are doing it now, they're not knocking on doors.
12:52They're jumping the fence.
12:54It's self-made.
12:55This whole festival is full of people who did it they self, built their audience,
12:58and now they're the ones in charge of the gate they damn self.
13:03So a lesson like that, I have to sit back and go, okay, if I want to teach my son the idea of minding your business at your job,
13:14okay, well, where did I learn that?
13:16The thing that I've always wanted to instill in my son, one freedom that I always respected about my house growing up,
13:25I had the freedom to plead my case to my mama.
13:29Now, you couldn't be disrespectful in it, but you could always give your side of the story.
13:35You're still going to get on punishment.
13:37She's still going to take the Nintendo controller.
13:40But you were free to say your case.
13:42So I always wanted that for my son.
13:45So then I had to start thinking about, well, I want that for him, but I never had that with my father.
13:51Well, what is an example of where you wish you'd have said something to your dad and you didn't?
13:58And that becomes a story.
14:00And then you think about the regret you carry for not saying the thing or not asking the thing.
14:06And I want to be able to free my son of ever regretting not saying something to me or not asking me about something.
14:14Like, you know, we live, I co-parent with his mother right now.
14:18My son is nine.
14:19Like, we walk, we live nine blocks apart.
14:22So the weeks I don't have my son, he know that I'll ride that damn e-bike right up to them.
14:28I'll ride nine blocks and be right there on his neck.
14:31But he also felt comfortable enough to ask me one day, why do we live in separate homes?
14:38You should be, you should never fear your parents.
14:43I feared my dad.
14:45I think fear, to a degree, as a parent, it helps, but you're compromising communication and respect in the long run.
14:54And I think that you can still be a disciplinarian, but not necessarily have to rule by fear.
15:00Fear is a good, important seasoning in there, just a little bit, because I need you to fear what's going on out there.
15:06Because part of why I'm on your neck is because I'm trying to prepare you.
15:09I love you because you're going out into a world that doesn't.
15:13So for me, it was just about thinking about the moments and the stories that meant the most to me that I want to tell to him.
15:22Every lesson that I believe as a man isn't in there.
15:25That's why we call the book a semi-memoir.
15:27It's not every single thing that happened in my life.
15:30It's every single thing that I think is important that gave me the values that I have as a man.
15:36So how did you reach that balance then?
15:38Because you spoke about the fear that you have for your dad, and you don't want your son to fear you.
15:43How do you navigate that where it's not a thing of disrespect, or your son wants to be your friend when he should want to be your son?
15:51How did you reach that balance?
15:52I think that's a balance you still maintain.
15:54That's a balance you still work to find as a parent, because kids find new ways to try you.
16:01You're like, yeah.
16:02As soon as you think you're on a good page with your kids, then the next thing you know, they done done something new to try you.
16:09I think that you have to teach your children about consequences.
16:14It's consequences to actions.
16:16And so for me, the idea that my son is doing something solely because he's scared of me negates his ability to understand the value of it in the moment.
16:25I don't want to have a child that 20 years from now, he'd go, oh, that's what you was trying.
16:30But I want him to make sure that he knows he can always come to me with anything, any problems that you're dealing with out there in the world.
16:37But at the same time, I need you to do this, and there's a reason for it.
16:40And so I try to give an explanation after the fact, and that's kind of, for now, that's the middle ground at work with me and my boy.
16:48Do it because I said do it.
16:51Now, after you've done it, I'm going to explain to you why I had you do it.
16:55And then when I walk him through that, he goes, oh, okay, I get it.
16:59Whereas our parents, I don't know, you know, I ain't going to guess nobody's age.
17:02I'm 46.
17:03I was raised in do it because I said do it.
17:06And in 28 years, when you have a kid of your own, you'll understand.
17:11So I try to kind of maintain a middle ground because also in letting my son know why I told him to do something, you need to understand you're not smarter than me yet, bro.
17:20You don't know everything yet.
17:22I'm here for a reason.
17:23I'm a blessing in your life because the world ain't going to explain nothing to you.
17:27So maybe if you be quiet, you'll get the knowledge.
17:32So this book, you called it a semi-memoir too.
17:35So that means revisiting some painful and complicated memories sometimes.
17:40Was there a chapter or an excerpt in a book that was particularly difficult for you to write?
17:46My father's death.
17:49We wouldn't know.
17:49Like my dad, I had like a good, terrible husband, decent father.
17:56Does that make sense?
17:57Yeah.
17:58Like, so for context, I'm my mother's only child, but I'm the ninth of 11.
18:06And by some context, by some counts, I'm the 11th of 13 children.
18:12So it just depends.
18:13We don't really count the mother too because they don't come around.
18:15But the complexities of having two younger half-brothers that live across town.
18:23My father, it was the classic second family across town.
18:27There were nights that my dad did not come home.
18:30There were nights that the bills weren't paid and he was across town.
18:33And, you know, when I go on Facebook, y'all know how Facebook has that feature where Facebook will just show you a picture from 10 years ago that you posted and stuff, right?
18:44My little brothers during Father's Day, they post pictures of them and their dad, of our dad.
18:51And you know them old school Polaroid joints, they got the date at the bottom of the picture.
18:55I can look at the date of a photograph that my two little brothers posted with my dad and I can tell you whether or not the lights was on at my house.
19:04So what that created in me, what I discovered, and it wasn't until I wrote this book that I discovered this.
19:11There's a chapter in there about where my parents got into an argument and my pops didn't pay the light bill.
19:18He didn't pay the gas bill, I'm sorry.
19:20He didn't pay the gas bill for like a month and a half.
19:23And the gas got turned off.
19:25And my mom, all of her money's wrapped up in grad school and law school and just trying to keep the rent, trying to keep the, like, situations where you have to choose, do you want lights or do you want heat this month?
19:38Some nights, some weeks we chose lights.
19:41And so what that got in me was an idea that I don't ever want to be without money.
19:49So somewhere around seventh grade, I started raking leaves, cutting grass, and really started doing work around the neighborhood.
19:57I used to sweep, there was a church's chicken on the west side.
20:01Some of the people were from West End.
20:02It's the Green Acres now.
20:03But there used to be a church's chicken.
20:05I got sent to summer school in ninth grade.
20:07And in ninth grade, West End High School was right across the street from church's chicken.
20:12And that smell of that good-ass chicken would come through that window.
20:16And I would just stare at that church's chicken.
20:18And I saw a dude that would come out and sweep the parking lot every day at 2 o'clock.
20:24And so I got out of school one day.
20:26I go across the parking lot, and I go, hey, man, let me sweep the parking lot, and you give me a three-piece of chicken and a honey biscuit.
20:34He go, cool.
20:35He don't want to be outside in the heat.
20:37So I get a job sweeping the parking lot of church's chicken.
20:41Now I go to the gas station next door, and I go, hey, man, the dude at church's give me $20 to sweep the parking lot.
20:48But here's what I'm going to do for you.
20:49Instead of charging you $10, give me $10 worth of candy out this store, and you write it off as shoplifting.
20:56I'll sweep the parking lot for you.
20:58He say, cool.
20:59I take that $10 of candy, walk it back to summer school the next day, flip that, now I got $20 in my pocket.
21:06You do that every day over the course of a six-week summer school, the fucking gas is going to be on the next time it's cut off.
21:13And so you have these moments of reflection.
21:19Now the flip side of that is that now you become self-reliant, and the idea of needing people is something that you kind of push back on.
21:32To this day at 46, I still cope with that.
21:34Everything I've done has been to try and make my mother's life easier so she's not stressed.
21:41And a lot of that comes from the actions of a man that I love so dearly who at times would choose the family up the street to the point where when I started talking to my little brothers,
21:52and this was too hard to put into the book because I couldn't quantitate a value with it.
22:01But in the breakup with my son's mother, the thing that I became fearful about and still am is the idea of how do you show love to a black child if you yourself are not yet in a relationship?
22:13There's only so much you can say about love, and sooner or later you have to actively show love.
22:19And you have to show love in a positive light.
22:23And I started reflecting on, well, when have I seen love?
22:30When have I seen a man truly appreciate a black woman in a way where you knew he would give his all for her?
22:41And the more I sat and reflected, it was my dad and with the other woman across town.
22:47And so when you think about the idea of needing to teach your son love, and the only reservoir you have to pull from as an example was something that damaged your own upbringing.
23:03I don't know what you do with that.
23:05So, you know, it wasn't something that, to me, fit properly, but the idea of having the realization of just how much you can love someone and how much the world can love them and how much they can be revered by people, and it's still not have been enough for you.
23:27And it's okay.
23:29And it's okay to talk about that, and it's okay to put it out there, because I know some of my family on my pop side, they're going to have some problems with them first four chapters.
23:37But it's my story.
23:38That's what I felt.
23:39You know, when I did the correspondence dinner in 2023, I gave a shout-out to black media when I was on stage.
23:46And it was a little center table, and it was a lot of black journalists there, April Ryan, Lester Holt, like just all of the black journalistic OG, Roland Mark, and half of those people at that table either worked with my dad or were hired by him.
24:03So his contributions to black America are undeniable, and I will not take that away, and I will not undermine that.
24:12I will not undercut it, but it was the idea of how to tell the story of how some of those actions affected me, because I have to tell that, because I got to talk about what I'm going to do with my son.
24:22So, yeah.
24:24So if someone out there, specifically maybe a father, feels like they didn't grow up with the tools to be a parent or a world model, what would you say to them?
24:32If you didn't grow up with the tools, I think that you have to start talking to other men who you think did.
24:39There's somebody in your circle you respect, and you start with that person.
24:43One thing I really benefited from growing up in stand-up is that I opened for, for the most part, I opened for black male comedians because of sexism, if we're just being honest.
24:57Like, they just don't put black male in front of black women.
25:01Like, I might have opened for Cheryl Underwood once or twice, Adele once or twice, but D.L. Hughley was a mainstay.
25:09Bruce Bruce, when he used to come through.
25:11This is old school Comet View.
25:12I know some of y'all are old enough to remember BET's Comet View era.
25:16And so I opened for all those dudes, Lavelle Crawford, all of them, and they were solid-ass dudes in the green room.
25:23And that was the example.
25:24And so I think that if you're a man and you look back and you didn't have those examples, you had no male role models or you had, like, addiction issues in your family or abandonment issues in your family, I think you start as best you can either with positive people in your social circle or positive people within your community that are doing something right and doing something the right way.
25:45Has your son read the book yet?
25:48Oh, he ain't going to read this for about another 10 years.
25:50He better not.
25:51Cool, cool.
25:51That's perfect.
25:52I got a whole chapter in there about a pimp.
25:54I can't.
25:55I got some advice from him, too.
25:57I'm just saying.
25:58So what do you hope he takes from it in 10 years when he does read it?
26:01I think whenever my son finally does read this book, I hope that he understands that everybody around you is trying to pour into you.
26:10And if you're smart enough to keep your eyes and your ears open, you might learn something.
26:14I love that.
26:15I love that.
26:15And before we get out of here, I just want to tell you, Aurora's going to be doing some book signings for purchase.
26:20I think I'm on the other side.
26:22Am I over here?
26:23This side?
26:24I don't know.
26:25I'll be over there.
26:26Yeah, I'll be over here.
26:26I'll be over here on this side.
26:28Okay.
26:28Yeah.
26:28Y'all give it up for Aurora Wood Jr.
26:30Thank y'all.
26:31Enjoy the rest of Essence Fest.
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