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What's it like being a 'Daily Show' correspondent now? Roy Wood Jr. explains

Two months before the presidential election, "The Daily Show's" Trevor Noah picked apart then-candidate Trump's outreach to black voters and his visit to a Detroit church.

Then Noah invited correspondent Roy Wood Jr. to explain further.

"Stop acting like Trump packed out the cathedral," Wood Jr. joked. "He was in a normal-sized church, and it was half empty. Do you know how hard it is to not to fill a black church? Black people stop at church, on their way to church."

While Trump dominates so much of late-night, Wood Jr. manages to find fresh takes on the same news stories that every late-night comic is picking over. And he brings the air of a seasoned comic with an already-refined voice.

A Birmingham, Alabama, native, he studied broadcast journalism in college and comes from a family filled with journalists. He started stand-up at 19, and did radio for a decade, becoming especially known for doing prank calls for a morning show. Through the years, he's been on the road, done TV late-night sets and was a finalist on "Last Comic Standing." But he became most visible to the public in 2015 when he joined "The Daily Show" at the same time as Jon Stewart's replacement, Noah.

Since then, the political environment has become increasingly fraught, the news cycle pace has gotten more frenzied, and the late-night comedy field has gotten more crowded. On "The Daily Show," Wood Jr. has played "Black Trump," shot field pieces about guns on college campuses and joked on set with Noah about the latest news, whether it's the Oscars or white supremacist rallies.

"The biggest issue is to not fall victim to just the knee-jerk reaction ... Really looking deeper at the issues and what something means in the long-term," Wood Jr. said in an interview. "It's one thing to go, 'Can you believe what he said on North Korea?' But then what does that mean in the bigger sense of diplomatic relations? The most difficult thing is to maintain sight of the bigger issue going on."

While Wood Jr. thinks Trump can easily divert the nation's attention from one topic to another, "we have to maintain on 'The Daily Show' that you can have multiple conversations at the same time."

The few short years on "The Daily Show" have really affected his stand-up. Working on the show "has forced me to delve deeper into topics," he said. "I can look back at jokes I even wrote five years ago, and see how much of a surface-level joke it was. It didn't delve into the psyche of something."

It wasn't until after Wood Jr. became a regular presence on Comedy Central that he released his first hourlong special, 2017's "Father Figure." While it may have been long overdue, his experience shows in the expertise of his delivery and the tightness of the material. He jokes about everything from the struggle for civil rights and the use of the N-word to bad customer service and pricey complicated smoothies.

He's still on the road, performing as he works on jokes for a 2018 special, with "more introspective material, where I talk about myself, and my world, and my views and thoughts."

But at the same time, he's preparing an act of topical jokes for a room full of journalists and politicians at the Oct. 25 Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner, where he'll "just start talking 100 percent about what's going on in the world."

"That's the big difference between the comedy club and the banquet, where I can talk about specific people," Wood Jr. said. "But as a whole, as an art, I don't like talking about people because people change. For me, I'd rather talk about the issue, because the issue is always going to be there."

The RTCA dinner is pretty different from a traditional club set in other ways. The environment isn't particularly conducive to comedy - the room is big, the lights are bright, the stage is full of people and there's a podium. "You're stripped of everything. All you have is your words and your microphone. It's like acoustic comedy."

Also, writing a 20-minute set with news-driven material that must stay fresh has never been harder, so Wood. Jr is also thinking in broader concepts. "The issues that are relevant in the news cycle move so d*** fast that it's such a moving target, that you almost have to fit your jokes around a thought process (rather) than an actual event," he said. "I don't know what will happen in the next four weeks."

While less headline-grabbing than the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the RTCA has had its big moments, too. Last year, Wood's "Daily Show" colleague Hasan Minhaj delivered a scathing broadside to the members of Congress in the room about the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting and gun control legislation. That performance generated plenty of buzz online and in Washington, and he nabbed the bigger profile dinner in the spring, also notable because President Donald Trump didn't attend.

"(Minhaj) wasn't just there to mess around and be jovial. He definitely had something to say and had an opinion," Wood Jr. said of last year's RTCA. "Part of why it was so pivotal was it touched on a lot of things that people were feeling at the time."

Jokes in these spaces "can be a rallying call to others. Hasan spoke his truth and a lot of people latched onto that."

As for how he's approaching the gig, Wood Jr. said, "What I cannot do is come there and ignore the realities of these times ... The more egregious offense is to be tone deaf than to bomb. If you're going to suck, at least have an opinion."

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