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- [00:01]
Capella University
This message comes from Capella University. With Capella's flexpath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University.
- [00:14]
Sam Brigger
Learn more@capella.edu from whyy in Philadelphia, I'm Sam Brigger with FRESH AIR Weekend. Today, Pico Iyer talks about coming out the other side of the 1990 wildfire that burned down his Santa Barbara home and kept him trapped for three hours until he was rescued after being rendered homeless. Sleeping on a friend's floor, he was told about a Benedictine monastery where they accept a few guests at a time.
- [00:42]
Pico Iyer
So it was a fact of being stripped down to nothing that made a Catholic monastery seductive to me.
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Sam Brigger
His new memoir is called Aflame. Also, we hear from Roy Wood Jr. Who his new comedy special, lonely Flowers looks at why people are so disconnected.
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Roy Wood Jr.
We don't even like talking on the phone. We get mad if the phone rings. The phone that was invented for talking, you get mad. Oh, hell no. You got to text me first. Don't just be calling me.
- [01:15]
Sam Brigger
That's coming up on FRESH AIR Weekend.
- [01:18]
Capella University
This message comes from NPR sponsor sadva. Founder and CEO Ron Rutson shares the story of how he got started Creating.
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Roy Wood Jr.
Saatva in 2007, 2008, I went out and I bought the most popular luxury mattresses.
- [01:34]
Tanya Mosley
I tore them apart and I realized based on the raw materials, cost and the analysis that I had done that I was able to sell that level mattress but with a very affordable price.
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Capella University
To learn more, go to swatva.com NPR this message comes from Schwab at Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own, plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. This message comes from BetterHelp. Every January brings you 365 blank pages waiting to be filled. What do you want your 2025 story to be? Therapy can help you craft the next chapters with purpose. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online with a diverse network of over 30,000 therapists worldwide. Visit betterhelp.com NPR today to get 10% off your first month.
- [02:49]
Sam Brigger
This is FRESH AIR WEEKEND. I'm Sam Brigger. Terry has our first interview. I'll let her introduce it when we.
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Terry Gross
First booked today's interview weeks ago. We had no idea how timely it would be. And for such a tragic reason. My guest, Pico Iyer, has written a new memoir about what he's experienced and learned in the more than 30 years that he's been going on retreats in a Benedictine monastery to practice silence and for contemplation, to get both out of himself and the world and deeper in. But the book begins with fire, and fire is a theme throughout. The monastery is surrounded by 900 acres of trees and on one side the ocean. It's in California's Big Sur, one of the most beautiful places in the US on the first page, a monk is describing to Iyer a wildfire that came close to burning down the monastery. It wasn't the first time and it wasn't the last time. At one point, the road was blocked and there was no way out. A little later in the book, we learned that Ayers family home in Santa Barbara, where they had lived for about a quarter century, where he was living at the time with his mother that burned to the ground. At the time that fire was part of the worst fire in California history. He was at home alone with his mother's cat when he was suddenly surrounded by flames five stories high and had no way out. After three hours of terror, he was rescued by a good Samaritan traveling around in a water truck with a hose. He and his mother lost everything, but he survived and the cat survived. His memoir is titled A Learning From Silence. A Flame is about the flame of passion and commitment in the monastic life, even for visitors on a retreat like him. And it's about the destructive, deadly flames of fire. Eyre is best known for his travel writing and for reporting and reflecting on the cultures and religions of the world. His previous book, the Half known In Search of Paradise, found him traveling around the world to discover what different cultures and religions perceive as paradise. Iyer has known the Dalai Lama for decades and is the author of an earlier book about him. He spent a lot of time in monasteries but remains secular. His mother was a professor of comparative religion. He was born and grew up in England, where his parents moved from India to study. When his parents moved to the US he remained in an English boarding school. He received degrees from Oxford and Harvard. We recorded our interview Monday. Pico Iyer, welcome back to FRESH air. It's a pleasure to have you back on the show. This is a very moving book and a really fascinating book because of your experiences at the monastery. Where are you now?
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Pico Iyer
I'm in Santa Barbara, where happily today it's quite calm, the winds are low, and we're feeling very lucky compared with our neighbors. Two hours to the south.
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Terry Gross
Are you in the house that your mother had rebuilt after it burned to the ground?
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Pico Iyer
I have been staying there. The house lacked all electricity. There was no phone that was working, but that's where I've been staying the last four nights. They turn off the power as a precaution because the winds have been very high. So although there's no fire around us, I've been living by the light of a tiny lantern these last four days.
- [06:15]
Terry Gross
Why do you think your mother and the monastery keeps rebuilding when they know they're in the path of wildfires?
- [06:23]
Pico Iyer
In the case of my mother, it's a matter of insurance policies. So when our house burnt to the ground, we received a settlement, which is enough to rebuild the house that you previously had, but probably not enough to buy new property elsewhere. So almost logistically, you have to go back to the place that you just left, unless you want to radically leave your home, your friends, your doctor and dentist, and everything behind. In the case of the monks, they are making a commitment to living far from the world at the grace of God, at the mercy of the heavens, not knowing what will come next. So there it's more a conscious decision to live on the edge of the world and in the middle of the wilderness. I remember there's a great Zen monk who says, a monk's duty is to live on the edge of the abyss, and that's what my Benedictine friends are doing in Big Sur.
- [07:12]
Terry Gross
So you were trapped with flames five stories high. I don't even know how they would get that high since you weren't living in an apartment building or anything. But it seems, like, so terrifying. And I just wonder what went through your mind when you didn't think you had a way out and did images, almost like biblical images or images of Hindu funeral pyres because your parents were from India, they're Hindu. Did those kind of images flash before your eyes?
- [07:45]
Pico Iyer
I think it's one of those things that if you think about or remember or anticipate is terrifying. But when you're in the middle of it, you're just acting. So I climbed up the stairs. I saw that we were encircled by flames. I literally didn't have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away. I just grabbed my mother's cat, raced into a car, and drove down the driveway, not thinking that a car was probably the worst place to be. And I think actually having my mother's aging, panting cat in my lap for three hours as we were encircled by flames was a great help because it allowed me to concentrate on keeping the cat alive and not just to think how vulnerable I was feeling. And I think also it was much easier for me to go through that whole experience because I'd been in the midst of the fire. My poor mother, at the end of that evening, just received a phone call from me because she was away in Florida, saying, you've lost everything in the world. Your whole 60 years has been wiped out. And, of course, she felt powerless in a way that I didn't, because I felt so close to losing my life that at the end of that evening, losing all my possessions wasn't the end of the world.
- [08:54]
Terry Gross
So you managed to get out of the house, but you were surrounded by flames in your car?
- [08:58]
Pico Iyer
Yes. And for 45 minutes, we were actually right underneath the house. So I could see the flames systematically making their way through our living room and then moving down to my bedroom, where all my childhood mementos and photos and toys were, and then going on to my office, and then really reducing my next eight years of writing. My next three books were all in handwritten notes to Ash. And again, probably it was a good thing that I could witness that and to realize that it was inescapable. There's nothing I or anyone could have done to prevent the force of that fury.
- [09:34]
Terry Gross
How were you changed after the fire? You'd lost all your possessions. You probably lost your manuscripts, your books, things that were really precious to you, probably photos, all kinds of things. You cared for your mother. She was in great distress, but you probably had a new outlook on being alive. How are you changed, and is it the fire that led you to seek out monastic retreats?
- [10:04]
Pico Iyer
In a very practical way, it was a fire that moved me to seek out monastic retreats because I was sleeping on a friend's floor for many months as my mother and I slowly reconstructed our lives. And another friend came in and he saw me there and said, pico, you can do better than this. And he told me about this Benedictine monastery three and a half hours up the coast. And he said, well, if nothing else, you'll have a bed to sleep in there. You'll have a big desk. You'll have a beautiful walled private garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Hot showers, food, all for $30 a night. And so it was a fact of being stripped down to nothing that made a Catholic monastery seductive to me, or the notion of any bed to sleep in appealing to me. But in A deeper way. When I think back on it, I remember that as soon as a fire truck finally got to us and told me that it was safe to drive downtown, I went straight to a supermarket and I bought a toothbrush. And that toothbrush was literally the only thing I had in the world. And then I went to a friend's house to sleep on the floor. But before I went to sleep, I went to her computer, because my job in those days was to be a columnist for Time magazine, writing the back page essays. And I just had this eyewitness view on the worst fire in Californian history. So I wrote an account then and there, the evening I lost everything. And to speak specifically to your question, when the insurance company offered to replace my possessions, I realized I could live without 90% of the books and clothes and furniture that I'd accumulated. In some ways, I could live much closer to the life I'd always lived, an uncluttered life. And having lost all my notes, I realized now I'm going to have to write for memory and emotion and imagination, which are really much deeper places. So as the months unfolded, for all the sorrow and shock of that loss, I realized that maybe it was opening certain doors as well.
- [11:58]
Terry Gross
Did you ask for everything to be replaced?
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Pico Iyer
No, I replaced very, very little. And my mother and I were living in a temporary apartment for three and a half years. So in any case, there wasn't much room. But I realized actually how little one needs to survive. And that luxury is not really a matter of how much you have, but how much you don't need. And suddenly I awoke to the sense I didn't need a huge amount.
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Terry Gross
I wonder if things are really different for people who were parents. You weren't a parent at the time?
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Pico Iyer
Yes, and also I should say that My mother was 59 at the time and I was 33. And so the notion of starting again was not something she could entertain. It was as if her whole past had been wiped to the ground, and there was very little to look forward to. And in my case, my past had been wiped to the ground and my future, as I'd anticipated, it had been eliminated. But at 33, of course, it's much easier to start afresh. And so I was fortunate in my circumstances. And as you say, so many people are not, and my heart, us out of them.
- [13:01]
Sam Brigger
We're listening to Terry's interview with Pico Iyer. His new memoir is called A Learning From Silence. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger. And this is FRESH AIR Weekend.
- [13:14]
NPR Sponsor
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Tanya Mosley
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- [14:20]
Terry Gross
So at the Benedictine monastery where you took refuge after the fire, they practice silence there, and you practice silence with intervals of talk as well. What did you find appealing about silence? Is that something you'd ever sought out before?
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Pico Iyer
It is something I'd sought out, and I probably have a kind of temperamental inclination towards monasteries. Even as a little boy, if I stepped into a convent or monastery, I felt a sudden longing, the way other people may feel when they see a strawberry cheesecake or whatever. It spoke to something inside me. But I the particular beauty of this silence is that it's not an absence of noise. It's almost a presence, as if years of prayer and meditation, not just in this monastery but in every convent and monastery, have created these transparent walls where suddenly the world comes to you with greater immediacy. And so the curious thing was, as I drove up to the monastery, as usual, I was conducting arguments in my head and fretting about deadlines and worried about my tax return and concerned about my aging mother. And I stepped into the silence and all of that fell away. It was as if little Pico and his tiny thoughts were left down on the highway. And instead I was in the midst of this beautiful scene above a radiant coastline. And I was in some ways released from myself, I felt, and released from my endless chatter.
- [15:48]
Terry Gross
It's funny, speaking for myself, sometimes when I'm really alone for an extended period of time, my mind is quieter. But other times the chatter gets louder because there's nothing to drown it out, you know, there's no outside world or outside, you know, outside of Maybe like the TV or books or whatever, but there's nothing to drown out the chatter or to distract. Did you experience that too, at any point?
- [16:17]
Pico Iyer
Well, as a writer, of course, I spend much of my day alone, and when I'm at my desk, the chatter is sometimes deafening. But what I experienced with the silence in the monastery was something very different. I was just thinking as I was walking down to talk to you, that it's as if suddenly in the monastery I realized I wasn't the center of the world. And the sort of me part disappeared and the world part became very strong. Thomas Merton, the great Trappist monk who lived with silence for 27 years, wrote, when your mind is completely silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real. And I think that's what I found. So although sometimes I've been there during storms and at very scary and uncertain times, my mind at least is quiet in a way that it isn't when I'm by myself elsewhere.
- [17:07]
Terry Gross
Can you physically describe the monastery?
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Pico Iyer
Well, Big Sur already is the place where the calendar falls away and the outside world feels very distant. And you're on this 60 mile stretch of coastline in central California where humans feel very tiny because you're just in the presence of tall redwoods, the huge expanse of the uninterrupted ocean, the cliffs and the sky. And then right perched at the top of a hill, There is this 900 acres of dry golden hills, pampas, grass, and a cluster of little huts where the monks stay and where there are 15 or so visitor stay. So it's already one of the most beautiful sights on Earth. In 1996, because I travel a lot, National Geographic magazine very kindly came to me and they said, we'll send you anywhere in the world on our dime to write a piece about a special place. And I'm sure they were thinking I would write about Tibet or Ethiopia or Antarctica. And I said, the only place I can think of is Big Sur. And so I just drove three and a half hours up the coast again, because that is as unworldly a location as I know it is.
- [18:18]
Terry Gross
Such a beautiful place. I don't mean the monastery itself, but Big Sur. And so I'm kind of wondering if going on a retreat there is like being in a privileged bubble or if it's like getting in touch with something so elemental, so essential about nature, about the world.
- [18:38]
Pico Iyer
It's both. I'm very conscious, I'm very lucky that I can summon up the time and resources to go on retreats there every season, sometimes for as Long as two weeks and three weeks. And one of the things that so disarms me is that the monks ask for so little, but still there is a voluntary donation involved. So I am keenly aware that many people in the world don't have that opportunity. But I do concentrate on silence, because that is available to anybody. And somebody who can't go on retreat can still go on a walk, can still turn off the lights and listen to music, can still try to free herself from the clamor of the world. And in order to just, as you say, bring yourself back to a sort of deeper reality that too often we Forget. I think T.S. eliot once wrote about the life we have lost in living, and I think many of us are crying out to find that life, but we're in such a rush, and the world is so distracted these days, we don't know how to put our hands on it. And I loved what you said in your introduction about how this isn't about getting away from the world, but actually getting deeper into it.
- [19:46]
Terry Gross
And in what ways do you feel like you get deeper into it when you're there?
- [19:51]
Pico Iyer
Because it's uncluttered and undistracted, and it's like having the most intimate conversation with the natural world. Again, as I'm talking to you here in Santa Barbara, my mind is too likely filled with the email I just answered, the latest CNN updates, the latest notification from United Airlines. As soon as I go there, where there is no cell phone connection, no Internet, no television, I'm freed of all that clutter. And suddenly it's as if I come awake to the beauty of the ocean. I'm suddenly fascinated by the rabbit that's standing on the splintered fence in my garden. I'm suddenly watching the moon rise, which I could be doing at home. But as soon as I am tempted to do it at home, I hear the phone ring, or I think of the hundred emails I have to answer. I take walks along the road under this great overturned salt shaker of stars, and suddenly I'm notic. Which, sadly, I don't do enough in the rest of my life.
- [20:48]
Terry Gross
How do you spend your day at the monastery?
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Pico Iyer
Well, that's the beauty, because, again, the monks have no rules, and they really. They don't ask you to attend services. There is five services a day. You can seek out counsel from them, which some people do, but really they're just freeing you to do nothing at all, which is really the hardest thing in the world. And it took me a while to realize it was only by doing nothing at all, I could begin to do anything. So the beauty of being there is that unlike every other day of my life, I have no plans. I couldn't tell you what I'm going to do the next day I'm there. I wake up and I follow instinct. Maybe I'll take a walk, maybe I'll read a book. Maybe I'll just sit out in my chair in my garden and look out at the sea. And I never allow myself that kind of latitude in my day to day life. And so every day really lasts a thousand hours. And one of the curiosities of it is that I feel I'm on the ultimate holiday or holy day. I feel as if I'm really doing nothing at all. And then when I return after three days, I open my suitcase and I find my heavens. I've written 40 pages and I've read six books. While as far as I was concerned, I was just doing nothing.
- [22:03]
Terry Gross
Thank you so much.
- [22:04]
Pico Iyer
What a real delight. Terry, thank you for the show. Thank you for inviting me to be on it and I really enjoyed talking to you.
- [22:12]
Sam Brigger
Pico Iyer spoke with Terry Gross. His new memoir is called A Learning From Silence. Our co host Tonya Moseley has our next interview. Here's Tanya.
- [22:22]
Tanya Mosley
My guest today, comedian Roy Wood Jr. Takes the serious, sometimes absurd stuff we deal with in everyday life and makes us laugh about it. Even news events that on the face of it are kind of scary. Like white men in America gravitating to militia groups.
- [22:38]
Roy Wood Jr.
You had to know the militias was coming. You knew it was coming. This is America, what we do in America. You have progress, then you have backlash. That's the cycle of this country. Progress, then backlash. You knew the militias was coming. Just look at the last four, five years. You can't have the first black woman vice president, the first black woman Supreme Court justice and the first black woman mermaid. It was too much and they couldn't handle it. That mermaid, that's the one that broke him. That damn mermaid. When they did that Little Mermaid remake, they was like, oh, no, brothers. Meet me at the bakery tomorrow, brothers. We'll lose in the White House. We'll lose in the courthouse. There's a fish in the water, brothers.
- [23:27]
Tanya Mosley
That's Roy Wood Jr. In his latest comedy special, Lonely Flowers on Hulu. It's Wood's take on how isolation has sent society spiraling into a culture of guns, protests, rude employees, self checkout lanes, sex parties. And he also talks about why some of us would rather be alone than connected. Wood is known for his razor sharp wit. He spent years on the stand up comedy circuit dissecting pop culture and current events. And for nearly eight years he was a correspondent for the Daily show with Trevor. Noah Wood currently hosts the CNN News quiz show have I Got News for your? Which was adapted from a long running British series under the same name. Roy Wood Jr. Thank you for being here and welcome back to Fresh Air.
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Roy Wood Jr.
Thank you for having me back. It is a pleasure.
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Tanya Mosley
You know the end of that clip I just played, you heard the beep. That was the N word. It was part of the punchline that you use in the joke and it almost is like an exclamation point. And I know that you have weighed whether you use it. I think you talked about in another special how you're on was like trying to not use it himself and not use it.
- [24:34]
Roy Wood Jr.
He's trying to quit it. He's on the patch. He's on the N word patch.
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Tanya Mosley
Right, right. He's on the N word patch. How do you decide when to use it in your comedy?
- [24:43]
Roy Wood Jr.
I try to use it in scenarios where I feel like if I'm impersonating a person who would have said it or if it is a feeling of exasperation, it's like if there is an emotion, then there is a word for it. And not everybody agrees with particular words. But I feel like once you've had the conscious thought, then as they say, God knows your heart, well, then you said it. So I'm not going to say frickin or gosh darn, that just for me does not work. I have resigned myself to the truth though, that certain words are going to nail to chalkboard certain people because they just don't like those words. And if that's the case, then I'm not sure if everything that I do is going to be for you. And that's fine. And when done properly, a comedy booker told me ages ago, this was late 90s, she said profanity should be the seasoning, never the main ingredient. And so I curse way more when I am first starting a joke. And a lot of that is just nervousness and curse words become, um, words like if you saw me in a comedy club working new material versus when it's polished, it's night and day. And so you have all of these curse words and there is scaffolding and then you slowly start taking the support beams away to see whether or not the joke is really funny.
- [26:14]
Tanya Mosley
I did notice though. I mean, I noticed when you were on Conan O'Brien his podcast, you used it and he didn't laugh, you know. Cause he kind of. It also can make people uncomfortable, right? It can make people, they don't know if they can laugh at it.
- [26:30]
Roy Wood Jr.
Can I laugh at this? Yeah. And that's the thing that for me, I'm just going to be my natural self. I'm not doing it deliberately to make you uncomfortable. But if you choose not to laugh, that's fine. I'm not the type of person that would trip at you laughing at it. But you don't know that about me. You don't know what type of black person I am. So I'm not. I'm still being myself for the people who rock with what I do. And if they get it, they get it. And if you choose not to laugh at that line but you laugh at the next joke, cool. We're perfectly fine. But I just, I've lost the desire to change how I am in the presence of everyone to make them feel comfortable. Because then when am I ever.
- [27:20]
Tanya Mosley
Okay, I want to play another clip from Lonely Flowers. In this clip you're talking about grocery shopping and how it seems like most store clerks have been replaced by self checkout. Let's listen.
- [27:34]
Roy Wood Jr.
We need that cashier back. The grocery store cashier was the connection for crazy people to feel seen. There's a lot of people that's alone in a basement just loading a rifle and once a week they need a snack. And that cashier was the connection. That's the job of the cashier to make lonely people feel like they have a connection. Grocery store cashier didn't care who you were. She making chit chat the whole while your coming down the belt. I like this flavor too. That brother go home and feel good about himself. She asking him about his dog and house. Mr. Gibbles, if you live alone and the cashier asks you about your dog, you'll ride that high for two months. You go home and look at that rifle. Man, I'm tripping. Let me put this rifle up. I got a friend at the grocery store. I can't be out here murdering.
- [28:43]
Tanya Mosley
That was my guest today, comedian Roy Wood Jr. And his new comedy special on Hulu called Lonely Flowers. Roy, I love that joke because I mean of course you went to the most extreme example but all of us, we do get a little dopamine when we have nice interactions like that and we are getting less and less of them.
- [29:02]
Roy Wood Jr.
You know when a stranger would just say, oh, I like your sweater.
- [29:06]
Tanya Mosley
Yes. It's like that's gone you know, writer Wesley Laurie said about you a few years ago, he wrote that you occupy this space between 1990s Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle in the early 2000s. Do you agree with that?
- [29:25]
Roy Wood Jr.
I take that as a high compliment. Wow. Considering I grew up studying both of them, along with Carlin and Sinbad.
- [29:38]
Tanya Mosley
I.
- [29:38]
Roy Wood Jr.
Don'T know how to agree with that. I feel like Chappelle takes on far bigger Dragons than I do. And I feel like Chris Rock's observations are far more astute and sharp and simple. I use way more words than Chris Rock ever would to make the same points or to say the same things. And I think that's the brilliance of Chris Rock, is the brevity. You know, love him or hate him, you don't have to agree with everything. But there are no wasted words. I go back and watch my old specials, I'd be like, man, that whole joke could have gone. Should put that joke on YouTube.
- [30:18]
Tanya Mosley
In bringing up Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, I also thought about is like, what does it mean for you to keep yourself grounded so that your humor feels connected to the larger sentiment? You know, as you become more and more successful, is that something that you think about?
- [30:37]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, you have to know what regular people are going through. You can't do that by just living in uber blacks your entire life. I consider comedy to be a form of journalism living, anthropology in its highest form. You know, you're doing anthropology on things that are still alive, things that are still evolving. So you have to be immersed in that. You have to bathe yourself in that a little bit. So, yeah, take the train. Talk to regular people. It's the thing I miss the most about morning radio more than anything. It's just talking to strangers. And then that becomes the things that I can take and put on stage. Because now you're helping to embody. You have an opportunity, in a way, to be a voice of connection.
- [31:34]
Tanya Mosley
How much time do you take to study your peers, other comedians?
- [31:39]
Roy Wood Jr.
You know, like some comedians have the ideology. I don't want to know what any comedian is saying because I don't want it to pollute my thinking where I'm the opposite. I want to know every single piece of known data that has been performed.
- [31:54]
Tanya Mosley
What does that do for you?
- [31:56]
Roy Wood Jr.
It tells me where not to go. So When I did BET's Comic View in 2004, I'd gotten turned down three years in a row, and I'd gotten so angry with them. The year before I got Comic View, I watched every episode, and I cataloged every topic that was breached by a comedian for the entire season. Here's how many jokes about, you know, ugly. Here's sex jokes, here's race jokes, here's president, famous people, Michael Jackson, like Kobe Bryant, like, cataloged it all and then just told myself that entire year, I won't make a joke about any of these things. So now, now, at minimum, I'm original.
- [32:48]
Sam Brigger
We're listening to comedian Roy Wood Jr. S conversation with our co host Tanya Mosley. His new stand up special is called Lonely Flowers. We'll hear more after a break. I'm Sam Brigger and this is FRESH.
- [32:59]
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- [33:20]
Capella University
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- [33:36]
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- [34:09]
Tanya Mosley
A lot about the journalism industry with the decline of trust and the fractured attention spans. And as you said earlier, you feel like comedy is a form of journalism. But through your role on the Daily show as a correspondent in this new news quiz show, I want to know from you. Like, that hasn't always been the case where you actually studied journalism and then you decided to be a comedian. But when? When did it become clear to you that, wait a minute, this thing that I'm doing as a comedian is actually a form of journalism.
- [34:42]
Roy Wood Jr.
When I started researching all the stuff I wanted to talk about and it was just like researching a dang story from college documentary research. And then once I approached it as that, then it became, oh, you can find interesting, like if you can sneak in something that people didn't know or didn't consider into your bits. Oh, cool. You know, the Daily show changed a lot for me creatively. Daily show taught me over analysis and how to find the angle on a topic that no one has touched yet. You know, we know what they're saying. What are they not saying, and how can we say that? And then Trevor Noah taught me, through observation as a black man, when to use your anger and when to keep it in your back pocket performatively. But performing in a state of aggression, as I was for the most part, coming into the Daily show doesn't help your point to land with everyone.
- [35:53]
Tanya Mosley
At what point in your life did you discover you were funny?
- [35:58]
Roy Wood Jr.
Mm. Mm. Maybe elementary school, fourth grade. Fifth grade. Humor was a weapon. We moved to Birmingham when I was in the fourth grade.
- [36:14]
Tanya Mosley
It was a weapon.
- [36:15]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, it was a weapon. It was a deflector smokescreen.
- [36:21]
Tanya Mosley
Trying to deflect.
- [36:22]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, Just trying to keep from getting bullied and get your sneakers stolen. It's the 80s crack era. So, you know, some cats is dangerous, and if they're not dangerous, they got an older brother who is. He always wanted to be cool. I kept my head low. I was a little class clowny in middle school, but, like, the idea of explicit thinking and premeditation of humor. I remember and jrotc, we would have drill every morning in high school. And so there was three tennis courts in a row, side by side by side. And we ran the perimeter of that like a makeshift track. And so you would have to run, I don't know, three or four laps around the tennis courts. And I would deliberately just jog and be well behind everybody, like two, three turns behind. And then on the last lap, I would call my comeback, like a Kentucky Derby announcer. And everybody else, we're all exhausted, and I'm trying to talk and run. It's wood on the outside. Wood is coming up strong. Oh, my goodness, what a comeback as they get into the back stretch.
- [37:42]
Tanya Mosley
What was your ROTC coach like or teacher instructor saying?
- [37:46]
Roy Wood Jr.
Sergeant Posey was not feeling this behavior at all, but what can you say? I'm running. You said run, so I'm running. And we would collapse across the finish line and just be howling with laughter. And it worked every time, and it just made me laugh, and there was no purpose to it, but it was just funny.
- [38:10]
Tanya Mosley
But you went to college for broadcast journalism. You got into some trouble, though, with the law that changed your trajectory.
- [38:19]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, yeah. But I mean, that whole thing, though, is part of what got me into standup. Because when I was 19. Yeah. We stole some credit card. Well, I stole the credit card. They was with me when we bought the stuff. And so, like, we.
- [38:34]
Tanya Mosley
Were they being your friends?
- [38:35]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so co defendant, as they're called in a court of law. So, 98, I get arrested for stealing some credit cards and buying stuff and selling clothing on campus or whatever. And so in that time, I get suspended from school. So this is Thanksgiving of 98, and I get suspended at the top of the year in January for essentially that whole year. Except I think I got back in school in, like, September, October or something. So during that time, I start doing standup because I think I'm gonna go to prison. I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna go to prison. Let me try everything. What was that thing Sinbad used to do? Oh, yeah. Stand up. Okay, well, where does standup happen? Oh, okay. Open mics. Oh, okay. Well, I'll go up to Birmingham. And I took a Greyhound up to Birmingham and performed and went back to the bus station, slept there. Cause I didn't want my mom to know I was in town. I didn't want her to know. Cause it's a black mom.
- [39:40]
Tanya Mosley
She didn't know. She didn't know about your arrest or.
- [39:45]
Roy Wood Jr.
No, she knew about the arrest. That's why she didn't want me doing comedy. You need to be somewhere with a job, looking gainfully employed so they don't send you to prison. To which I said, thanks, Joyce. I think I'm gonna sleep in bus stations.
- [39:59]
Pico Iyer
Right.
- [40:00]
Tanya Mosley
And go do comedy.
- [40:01]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah. This activity makes me happy, and I just want to be happy right now. And I ended up getting probation.
- [40:09]
Tanya Mosley
Yeah. Why were you doing that? Why was the credit card ring the way to make money? Because I assume it was about making money.
- [40:17]
Roy Wood Jr.
No, it wasn't. I mean, money is part of it, but at its core, what that started as. And it took going to therapy to really connect these dots. I didn't want my mother to worry about me. You know, I had a good father. He was a bad husband. And so, you know, money was tight a lot of the time because pops was tripping. And we moved to Birmingham because my parents reconciled in the third grade. I was in the third grade, maybe fourth. So I remember nights laying in my bed, first grade, second grade, and I could hear my mother asking friends for money. Like the late night calls, asking, you know, the borrow the money calls. Right. And then I remember. I remember when my dad died when I was 16. And, you know, my dad was one of them hyper black. You know, I'm not paying no taxes. The black man ain't got no rights. The right to vote expires. Voting rights, whatever. So my father never paid federal taxes. So when he died, they came for everything. They came for everything. And I remember that very well. I remember working 30 hours a week in high school to help with bills because I didn't want my mom picking up another job. And, you know, and I'm still trying to just be a child. I'm still trying to just play baseball, but I'm also working closing shifts. I violated every labor law you can name.
- [41:48]
Tanya Mosley
And you had all types of jobs, too, didn't you?
- [41:51]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, Just for my mom to be able to keep the house through my senior year of high school. And so when I got to college, I just want to be no damn burden, man. I'm tired of asking you for stuff and hearing this deep sigh. And I know what you gotta go through to try and make this pair of sneakers happen for me. So I'm just. I don't want to bother you. I just didn't want to be a burden to my mom. And I think that it wasn't about thrill seeking. It wasn't about stacking a bunch of cash and saving up to get a car and a gold chain. Everything started from a place of, I just want some clothes for myself so I don't have to call my mom and ask for clothes.
- [42:32]
Pico Iyer
Yeah.
- [42:32]
Roy Wood Jr.
And then, hey, man, I bought a couple extra pairs of jeans. Would you like some jeans? And then that guy going, hey, man, I told my friend about those extra jeans you got me. Can you get him some jeans? And then the next thing you know, you're kind of running an operation, and then the police come and go, hey, this is illegal. So we're gonna put you on probation for a little while. Go find a career during that time, and then when probation concludes, you can continue that career. And that's what happened. I was blessed to have a probation officer that gave a damn and allowed me to travel while I was on probation. That is not the norm. Not the norm, you know, and I'm very, very lucky. And that life that I was given back, you know, that's the life I've tried my best to not fumble since then.
- [43:31]
Tanya Mosley
Your dad, you mentioned Roy Woods Sr. He did not pay taxes, as you said, but he was a pioneering radio reporter in Birmingham. I mean, he covered the civil rights movement. He co founded the first black radio network.
- [43:44]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah. In Chicago. Yeah.
- [43:46]
Tanya Mosley
Yeah. Did you get to be around his work much when you were growing up?
- [43:50]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, I mean, I was there. I mean, he was a great father. Hey, Come with me to the radio station. I would sit at his feet while he read AP wire stories in the 80s. And, you know, I spent every summer with my father before my parents got back together. So I was around this man holding court in barbershops, talking to people about issues, talking to the mayor, talking to everyone about stuff. And I really feel like that was the early days of. How can I put it? The foundation of my ideologies. You know, my father knew all the black leaders. You know, my father was, you know, I don't want to say the man around town, but he kind of was.
- [44:35]
Tanya Mosley
He also was like. I mean, he was the news guy. You describe him as the voice that we would hear on the car radio in the morning, given the news, on the way to school, on the way to work. It just got me thinking about how much radio, that kind of media, it leaves an imprint on us, but it's also ephemeral, you know. Do you have any tapes or recordings of his work still?
- [44:59]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah, but they're all reel to reels. I haven't. I haven't straightened that out yet. You know, that's something I definitely need to get to because, you know, so much of what my father talked about in his commentary work was about a lot of issues with the black race that are still happening today. You know, as much as I. You know, I spent, you know, like any child, you go through a rebellion, period, against your parents while you want to be nothing like them. And then I look up and I look at the type of comedy that I talk about, and I am him, I'm just a little funnier.
- [45:35]
Tanya Mosley
Right. Did he have a sense of humor?
- [45:37]
Roy Wood Jr.
No, he. Now, you want to talk about somebody who used nothing but anger to drive what they was talking about. It was clear he was mad. Now, he could be smooth with how he delivered the knife into your rib cage, but you was gonna get the knife.
- [45:53]
Tanya Mosley
Messing around with my dad, he wasn't jokey. He was not silly. But he did help create one of black America's great contributions, Soul Train.
- [46:02]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yes.
- [46:03]
Tanya Mosley
Please, you please tell us the story.
- [46:05]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yeah. So my dad was the first black announcer at pretty much most stations he worked at in the 1950s and 60s, doing news, for the most part. And so he got with some people up in Chicago and decided to create the National Black Network. And the National Black Network was a series of syndicated news stories and articles and programs that would be sent out to black radio stations across the country. And it was simply black. It was the first of its kind, news for black People on black stations. So my father was the co founder of this joint up in Chicago at wvon. And they're looking for reporters. And my dad gets pulled over by a cop. And the cop has a really deep voice. And the cop goes, hey, man. My dad goes to the cop, he's getting a ticket. He's in the middle of getting a ticket. And my dad goes, yeah, man, you have a nice voice. You should quit the police force and come work for me. The cop was like, what the hell are you talking about? He's like, yeah, you have a nice voice. You have a voice for radio. You should be on the radio. You shouldn't be out here doing this. And my dad gave the cop his card. And the cop he gave the card to was Don Cornelius. Officer Don Cornelius of the Chicago Police Department. He'd only been on the force a year. He quit, started working at WVON as a reporter, got an itch for media. Eventually came up with a brainchild for a show like Dick Clark's American Bandstand. And he goes to my father and goes, hey, man, I'm taking up money if you want to be an investor in this show. My pops gave Don Cornelius some of the money to shoot the pilot for Soul Train. Now where the story takes a turn is that it took Don Cornelius too long to sell the show. We're talking about, like, my dad gave him maybe, like, let's just say $1,000, which is a gajillion billion dollars in.
- [48:00]
Tanya Mosley
1960 in today's dollars.
- [48:01]
Roy Wood Jr.
Yes. And my dad goes, hey, Don, I need that money, man. And Don goes, instead of giving you your money back, why don't I just keep you on as a producer? You can be an executive producer the rest of your life. To which my dad said, nobody wants to watch black people dance. Give me my money. Don paid him back. My father took the money, signed away his rights to any claims of the Soul Train empire.
- [48:28]
Tanya Mosley
Did he ever talk about that with you?
- [48:29]
Roy Wood Jr.
No.
- [48:30]
Tanya Mosley
And did you ever talk to it?
- [48:31]
Roy Wood Jr.
I could not watch Soul Train.
- [48:33]
Tanya Mosley
You never watched it growing up?
- [48:34]
Roy Wood Jr.
I was not around him. Better watch Solid Gold, MTV's the Grind. But you not watching Soul Train in this house. That's a story that was told to me by my older brothers. My dad never spoke of it, never brought it up. And I met Don Cornelius years later, and just. I couldn't bring it in me to bring it up. I wanted to so bad, but it just. It didn't feel like the right time and place. But I'm very thankful to Don Cornelius children for including that part of my father's contribution within the BET show that they had about Don's life.
- [49:12]
Tanya Mosley
Oh, wow.
- [49:13]
Terry Gross
Wow.
- [49:14]
Roy Wood Jr.
So, yeah, my dad was, you know, there was an actor that cast him. That whole get pulled over scene is in the show.
- [49:20]
Tanya Mosley
That's your dad. Yeah, that's in the show.
- [49:22]
Roy Wood Jr.
It was very kind of them. It was very kind of them.
- [49:25]
Tanya Mosley
You mentioned your son, and I'm just wondering, as your son gets older, are there any parts of fatherhood that you're like, now I understand looking back at your dad?
- [49:40]
Roy Wood Jr.
Hmm. Yeah. It's more of it in reverse. How could you miss all of this? I know this is the wrong can of beans to open up this late night in our conversation, but I think the moments I have with my son, a lot of them are moments that my father missed with me. So it's like, damn, man, how'd you miss this? You missed this. You ain't show up to the Boy Scout joint. You ain't show up to the chess tournament, baby, where was you at? What were you doing? Like, that would be the bigger question is, hey, man, I need you to account for your absences. So it would probably be like a terrible accountability evaluation conversation. Like if my dad was alive today, it'd be me yelling at a 80 year old man. Probably not fair.
- [50:30]
Tanya Mosley
Roy Wood Jr this was such a pleasure. I could talk to you forever. But thank you so much for this conversation.
- [50:36]
Roy Wood Jr.
Thank you. Thank you for this in depth conversation. Thank you for caring, researching and stuff. I can tell you went deep. You didn't just go through the first two pages of Google results on me. You went deep about 70 pages. In some of these questions.
- [50:54]
Sam Brigger
Roy Wood Jr. Spoke with our co host, Tanya Mosley. His new comedy special is called Lonely Flowers. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Millet. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.
- [51:32]
Capella University
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