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Roy Wood Jr. says debate culture great for ratings but bad for people?

Former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr joins Jerry Seinfeld, Margaret Cho and Kumail Nanjiani as a headliner at JFL Vancouver 2025.

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According to comedian Roy Wood Jr., the best way to lower the political temperature is for people to just calm down.

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“I do think that what has to change in politics, not just in America, but also globally, is that the idea of yelling and berating people who don’t agree with you is an effective way to reach them,” said Wood Jr. whose latest comedy special Lonely Flowers is currently screening on Hulu and Disney+. “There has to be a new strategy.”

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Wood Jr. is coming to Vancouver as part of the 2025 Just For Laughs Vancouver comedy festival. He is one 200 performers including Jerry Seinfeld, Kumail Nanjiani, Pete Holmes, and Margaret Cho who will be part of the 100-plus shows at 25 venues around the city from Feb. 13-23.

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A former The Daily Show correspondent, Wood Jr. is the host of Have I Got News For You, the CNN weekly panel show that asks guests to find the humour in the week’s big stories. Based on the British series of the same name, the show also co-stars Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black. It returns to CNN on Feb. 15.

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Speaking on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, Wood Jr. was paying no attention to the goings on in the Capitol rotunda. Instead, he was in New York observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

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“It’s pretty crazy,” said Wood Jr. about the return of Trump to the Oval Office. “I haven’t even bothered to turn it on and have a look. I just can’t bring myself to it.”

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While he was choosing to avoid the coverage of the ceremony, the comedian was forthright in his concerns of what the next four years will hold under a Trump administration. Acknowledging Canada’s current political climate, he offered a warning.

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“In a weird way, Canada is potentially on a course of getting its own education and what it looks like when conservative leadership holds all the rings,” said Wood Jr. “As we call it here in the States, the ‘F around and find out stage’.”

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Wood Jr. points to society’s fractured focus as the fertile ground for politicians to lay the seeds of distrust.

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“We’re a distracted society,” said Wood Jr. “Electronics and social media have made us perfectly distracted. Politicians, if it’s one thing they know how to do well, it’s run distractions.”

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Roy Wood Jr
Roy Wood Jr. is one of 200 performers that will be in Vancouver for the 2025 JFL Vancouver comedy festival Feb. 13-23. Wood Jr. will be at the Vogue Theatre on Feb. 16. Photo by Duane Cole /Duane Cole
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Wood Jr., who began his standup career in the late 1990s, has a degree in broadcast journalism from Florida A&M University. Both his brothers and his father work in media.

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“I’m a New York Times guy. I’m a USA Today guy, and then I just pick a random city and read a local newspaper, digital paper. But it’s just getting tougher and tougher because of the loss of local news,” said Wood Jr.

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He is wary of the 24-hour cable network news coverage pointing to the often-confrontational panel takes on the news of the day as a deterrent to viewing and a barrier to facts.

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“I think that journalism is polluted by too many people giving opinions. There’s too many shows where people are just yelling at each other, and yelling equals ratings,” said Wood Jr. “Nobody likes boring discourse. … I think that the debate culture and journalism was great for ratings, and it was bad in the long run, in terms of creating safe places for where the truth could be believed and absorbed.”

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As for the screams of “fake news,” Wood Jr. says it is the responsibility of the consumers of news to do some work to ensure the information they are allowing to enter their brains is valid.

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“We need to question everything we put in our minds with the same aggression that we question what we put in our bodies,” said Wood Jr. “If you’re getting your news from one place, you’re ignorant, and I don’t care who you voted for. If you’re getting your opinions and perspectives from one place, you’re ignorant and you are not well-rounded. That’s dangerous.”

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That danger level, he notes, just rose with Mark Zuckerberg’s recent removal of Meta’s moderation guardrails.

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“I think one of the biggest things that’s happened this month is changing the requirements, loosening rather, the requirements on Facebook and allowing, essentially, for more turds in the punch bowl of information,” said Wood Jr. “And if somebody’s not scooping the turds out, it doesn’t matter how much truth is in (the punchbowl).”

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Wood Jr.’s just-released standup special, Lonely Flowers, offers comment on the ills of a society that has seen so many people siloed off into singular viewpoints and existences.

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“It was really a love letter to society about the loneliness epidemic that we’re dealing with as a society right now,” said Wood Jr. about the special.

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Connecting with others is something Wood Jr., did recently on a rather unique and real scale. During the early part of January while the fires raged in Los Angeles, Wood Jr. visited L.A.’s busiest firehall in Compton and ended up spending an evening riding along with firefighters as they dealt with the daily calls, which certainly didn’t stop when the wildfires blew up.

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“I was going by to just have a conversation with them to get an understanding of what it’s like covering the rest of the city while the other firefighters are up the mountain doing what they’re doing,” said Wood Jr. “It was truly a beautiful thing to just be able to be allowed to be a part of. I also wanted to be a firefighter as a kid, one of my favourite movies is Backdraft. I grew up watching the television shows Third Watch and Emergency.”

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Video from his experience can be seen on YouTube.

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Dgee@postmedia.com?

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