The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that comedian Roy Wood Jr. will be the featured entertainer at its annual dinner on April 29, 2023. A correspondent for The Daily Show, Wood is an accomplished standup comedian and podcast host who uses satire to shed light on serious topics including race and discrimination in the US. His latest hour-long standup special Imperfect Messenger is now streaming on Paramount+.
Wood was a broadcast journalism major at Florida A&M University in 1998, when he fell in love with comedy and launched his career in standup. He has been featured on just about every late-night comedy show on network TV, HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, and was one of the top three finalists on Last Comic Standing on NBC. He also executive produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary The Neutral Ground.
While still finishing his degree and touring as a comedian, Wood was “the voice of morning news WVHT 105.7” in Tallahassee. He later hosted The Roy Wood Jr. Show on WBHJ in his hometown of Birmingham and spent three years in Atlanta at WALR.
Wood joined the “Best F#@ing News Team” as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in 2015. But Wood doesn’t just play a reporter on TV. Journalism is in his genes. His late father Roy Wood Sr. was a pioneering radio and television journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the South African Soweto race riots, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe civil war and went to the front lines in Vietnam to report that members of black platoons were dying faster than white soldiers. Wood Sr. received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
“It’s an honor to be a part of a long-running tradition of celebrating those members of the media, who work so hard to uncover the truth, and hold our government accountable,” said Wood Jr. “It will be a great night that will go down in the history books, or not, depending on which state you live in.”
This year’s dinner program will again be produced by Bob Bain productions, who helped make last year’s WHCA dinner a success.
“Roy Wood Jr. brings a journalistic eye to his comedy. He’s hilarious – but also makes sure his audiences are thinking as they laugh,” said Tamara Keith, WHCA president and White House correspondent for NPR. “My aim with this year’s dinner is to lift up the importance of a free and independent press to a functioning democracy, so I am thrilled to be able to feature a comedian who gets what journalism is all about.”
The WHCA dinner is traditionally attended by the President and First Lady as well as senior government officials and members of the press corps. Proceeds from the dinner help finance all the WHCA’s work, including awards recognizing excellence in the profession and scholarships for journalism students, awarded with the hope of building a next generation of White House journalists who reflect America.
The WHCA comprises hundreds of members from the worlds of print, television, radio and online journalism. Their work, for outlets based in the United States and overseas, reaches a global audience.
The all-volunteer WHCA board works to ensure that the journalists who cover the White House have the ability to seek answers from powerful officials, up to and including the President. That includes everything from advocating for access and managing the pools of reporters who stay close to the president to remodeling the on-site press workspace and handling logistics for the press corps following the president on overseas trips.
For more information, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press.
Mr. Wood is repped by Mainstay Entertainment, CAA and Sechel PR.
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