On Friday, NPR previewed the liberal comedy for the liberal journalists at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Morning Edition co-host Leila Fadel interviewed the featured comedian -- Roy Wood Jr. from The Daily Show, who cracked that if he's really hilarious, President Biden will grant all black people reparations.
LEILA FADEL: When you think about what you're going in to do and walking away on Saturday, what will success be for you?
ROY WOOD JR: Just to get people to laugh. The rest of it I can't control.
LEILA FADEL: You're not going to solve the debt ceiling standoff...
ROY WOOD JR: No.
LEILA FADEL: ...Tomorrow?
ROY WOOD JR: I can't. It'd be great if I got Black people reparations at the end. Like in - yeah. Like, if Joe Biden came back up to the podium and is like, you know what? That was hilarious. All right, Black people. Reparations.
Wood compared himself to his journalist father, who wasn't funny: "I got into journalism because I wanted to be like [ESPN anchor] Stuart Scott. I just wanted to be funny and talk about sports. Then as I got older and matured, you just start realizing certain truths about the world. Then you have a child. And then you're like, we got to stop these people. They're crazy. You access a different joke plane at some point."
He complained about having to make jokes. "When you look up and you see one of the officers that killed Breonna Taylor this week started a new job as a deputy at an adjoining county in Kentucky, and now I'm in the room with all of the people who filibustered the police reform bill that could have stopped that from happening."
Wood said the people who really need to hear him -- the white conservatives -- won't be there.
ROY WOOD JR: I do not care who's there. Most of the people who need to hear what I have to say aren't going to be there anyway because they don't want truth spoken to them.
LEILA FADEL: Like who?
ROY WOOD JR: I would imagine Trump's not going to be there. I would imagine DeSantis isn't going to be there. I would imagine Ted Cruz isn't going to be there. I kind of hope Tim Scott is there. If Tim Scott's there, there's a quick back-and-forth about bipartisanship. I know he and Cory Booker didn't see eye-to-eye on the police reform bill. And then there was also - the one that Tim Scott proposed, which Democrats filibustered. But then there was also a Democratic version - the George Floyd Policing Act. They're like, well, pass mine. No, pass mine. Pass my police reform bill. No, pass my police reform bill.
The fact that Republicans and Democrats were able to filibuster and not pass a police reform bill is progress. Four years ago, we didn't have a police reform bill - definitely not one from Republicans. So who knows? Maybe in 40 years, we'll have police reform.
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