In his first stand-up special for Hulu, the CNN host and former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. explores how politics, the pandemic, technology and social media have left us drifting apart from one another, and what it might take to bring us back together again. What works better for making human connections: Big laughs or big bubbles?
ROY WOOD JR.: LONELY FLOWERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Roy Wood Jr.’s first three stand-up specials came out on Comedy Central and later Paramount+, which made sense considering his occupational tie-in at the time as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
When Noah left Comedy Central, Wood (and plenty of Wood’s fans) thought he might get the gig. When Wood realized he wouldn’t, he sought greener and more prosperous pastures elsewhere, and even makes a sly reference to that career pivot in this new hour. He did find a soft landing spot for himself, not only with this Hulu deal, but also his current gig hosting the weekly comedy panel program on CNN, Have I Got News For You, an American adaptation on the long-running UK series.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Wood compares his style of observational comedy to journalism, and because of his current and past jobs onscreen, you’re likely to consider him in a similar vein as his former TDS colleagues, Ronny Chieng and Hasan Minhaj.
Memorable Jokes: Filming in D.C., which Wood jokingly refers to as the home of protesting, his opening lines play to both sides of the political aisle, as he laments that for everyone, there will come a time when you’ll find yourself “caught in the traffic of a protest you agree with,” during which you may find yourself questioning your motives and agenda.
Of course, point in fact, Wood’s actual opening line sounds a more dour note: “We ain’t gonna make it.”
But who’s we, and where, pray tell, is it, exactly? Wood’s thesis on our loss of connection can be traced to technology and social media, but he traces it even more to the source. Retail politics. Or more to the point, the politics of retailing. As self-service checkout and online shopping have removed the cashiers and sales people from the transaction, we’ve lost something even bigger, perhaps. Wood jokes about finding true customer service still at the local Foot Locker, noting the importance of good customer relations at the gun range/shop, and how cashiers provide vital interpersonal connections to the loneliest, most troubled among us.
He brings the point home through a few personal stories. In one, Wood reveals how he unintentionally agreed to hire a personal photographer who was suffering in the wake of his military service. More generally, Wood confides how finding friends in your 40s may never form the same bonds as those pals you made when you were in your 20s, before you had grown up.
He also shares a lighthearted story about a couple he had interviewed for a Daily Show segment who subsequently invited him to a sex orgy in Puerto Rico, and a more sincere tale about how Wood’s mother supported him during his early broke years in stand-up, and how her attitudes toward never giving up on her career kept him going.
In the end, Wood shares how he bore witness some truly magical, bubbly love connections, and how that put his own pursuits into stark perspective.
Our Take: Wood has long been one of my favorite working stand-ups today, precisely because of how seriously he takes his job of observing the way we are, and how funny he is in uncovering the specifics of what’s so ridiculous about how we are.
So even when he tackles a premise as seemingly hacked to bits as the self-service checkout, Wood doesn’t trod the already hackneyed path. Instead of seeing what we might gain from self-service in terms of shoplifting, Wood sees what we have lost in the human connections with a cashier. Sure, the “self check-out overlord” makes for a humorous visual in his description of the new retail experience, but his probing also uncovers how it makes life as worse for the pharmacy employees as it does for us that we need to hunt them down to unlock something as trivial as a deodorant shelf. And as someone who lived in NYC during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I can attest to the idea of maintaining what little sanity I had through the moments spent bonding with the masked cashier at the neighborhood supermarket.
And while other comedians mock our technological algorithms for knowing us too well, Wood notices how their security questions provoke us into nostalgia for times gone by, and how so often those are things we offer up freely to hackers through our other nostalgic posts.
As Wood enters middle age, he may poke fun at his own expense by having a fictional retail worker describe him to a coworker as “Stanley from The Office...on Ozempic,” but truly, the sparkle in his eye and cracking of his voice as he ramps into a rant makes for a more apt comparison to the late great Bernie Mac.
Like Mac, Wood is a consummate pro as a stand-up, not afraid of any audience. He even sticks the landing with not only one killer callback, but also an actual call back.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You may have to tune into CNN or Max to see Wood dole out topical punchlines on a weekly basis in 2025 instead of behind the Comedy Central desk (or any other late-night gig) four to five times a week, but count your blessings you get that much. For Wood remains one of the best in the stand-up game.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Roy Wood Jr.: Lonely Flowers’ On Hulu, Where The Comedian Questions Our Ability To Connect appeared first on Decider.
