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Three days before Donald J. Trump becomes president again, Roy Wood Jr., a crafty progressive-leaning comic, has released a special, \u201cLonely Flowers<\/a>,\u201d that begins with this ominous line: \u201cWe ain\u2019t going to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n It gets your attention and raises questions. Who is \u201cwe\u201d? What aren\u2019t we going to make? Is this going to be funny or bleak?<\/p>\n Wood, who has described his comedy as a kind of journalism, likes teasing introductions that throw you into the middle of a thought. His 2017 hour, \u201cFather Figure,<\/a>\u201d opens with this great joke: \u201cBut if we get rid of the Confederate flag, how am I going to know who the dangerous white people are?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLonely Flowers,\u201d on Hulu<\/a>, is not directly about Trump, but it\u2019s the first major special since the election to capture the fractious mood in the culture that gave him a victory. This hour, both funny and bleak, does not specialize in topical political bits, but jokes that build a broader, deeper argument: Less newspaper editorial, more magazine essay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As the title hints, the new special focuses on the implications of the growing solitude of Americans. It\u2019s comedy that echoes perfectly with the Atlantic cover story \u201cThe Anti-Social Century,\u201d<\/a> by Derek Thompson, who makes the case that the radical decline in time we spend with other people is the hallmark of our era. But while that article deploys facts, statistics and reportage to illustrate the repercussions of this lack of connection, Roy Wood cracks wise about the grocery store cashier. He gets across the same cautionary point.<\/p>\n Wood\u2019s gift is melding small-bore observational humor into a resonant metaphor. Americans used to be known for our customer service. Now, he says, you can\u2019t even expect an amiable reception at a gun range. \u201cHow you going to be rude to someone who showed up to practice murder?\u201d he asks, flabbergasted.<\/p>\n Wood tells us that stores once employed many more people, including greeters whose only job was to say hello to customers. \u201cYou were extra special if you were Black because they had an employee who followed you around,\u201d he said, one of many times in this hour he deploys mock innocence to sell a punchline.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s the cashier Wood makes the most of, in part because the changing nature of the job reflects one of the dominant causes for our lack of connection, the push of technology, like self-checkout. The whole point of having a person take your money, Wood argues, is not convenience or assistance; it\u2019s to make lonely people feel seen. The case against self-checkout is usually about the loss of jobs, but Wood focuses on the other side of the interaction: What are the implications of those vanished smiles, the absence of eye contact, the loss of small talk?<\/p>\n This subject must be in the zeitgeist, because it factors in another new comedy release this week that finds the positive side of automation: that it makes it easier to steal from Whole Foods. \u201cYou ever use those self checkout things?\u201d Ari Shaffir asks in his irreverent special \u201cAmerica\u2019s Sweetheart\u201d before adding: \u201cWhere you pay for some<\/em> of your things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Like Shaffir, Wood is a lopingly casual, cerebral comic. When he\u2019s animated, his delivery evokes a bit of the stand-up style of Bill Cosby. But Wood displays more lyricism and vulnerability. With a receding hairline, he allows his insecurity about his age or career or romantic choices to become the joke. When he tells a sentimental love story, he makes you feel it, using so much specificity and emotion that you forget you are watching standup comedy. That\u2019s when he makes his pivot. His jokes are full of surprising shifts. And you might even say this special is one, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not long ago, Wood, who worked as a correspondent on \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d on Comedy Central, seemed like a good bet to become its next host. I thought he would get the job \u2014 so did he. Midway through his new special, he describes telling his mother that she didn\u2019t need to worry about working anymore because Trevor Noah told him he was stepping down as host of \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d and this meant Wood would take over.<\/p>\n It was one of several jokes encouraging the audience to laugh at his na\u00efvet\u00e9. Comedy Central went with a rotating cast of hosts (before bringing back Jon Stewart on Mondays), and Wood left the show. He describes calling his mother back, a bit humbled. \u201cYou didn\u2019t quit, did you?\u201d he said. \u201cGot to go to Plan B.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, that has meant hosting a CNN panel show on the news and, according to a recent interview with NPR<\/a>, selling a few scripts and writing a book. There\u2019s also this special, a warmer, more wandering effort than his previous work and one that flexes different muscles than those he displayed on \u201cThe Daily Show.\u201d<\/p>\n Nightly topical humor involving Trump requires agility and directness. That kind of state-of-the-nation comedy is more layered, mixing political stories with personal ones. He makes elusive references to romantic relationships, and by the end of the special, the thought occurred to me that the opening line about not making it had as much to do with those relationships as it did with society.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Wood puts all of himself in this special. When he talks about how hard it is to make friends in your 40s, you get the sense that the difficulty of connecting is something he understands.<\/p>\n Comedians today react to the news quicker than ever. And there\u2019s already been work that speaks directly to what\u2019s coming in the second Trump term. Josh Johnson released a thoughtful set<\/a> on the tensions between Elon Musk and the MAGA movement that featured a sharp section about the obvious unhappiness of the richest man in the world. Yamaneika Saunders put out a riotous, visceral special<\/a> that indulges extreme pessimism, strategizing about slavery\u2019s return.<\/p>\n In Wood\u2019s stories, people today come off as exceedingly fragile, one misstep away from violence. We\u2019re always pingponging between progress and backlash, he says, but what\u2019s new is how isolation has changed us. His jokes about angry types who snap and write manifestoes feel timely.<\/p>\n What keeps us from giving in to our violent tendencies is not politics or even purpose, but simple human gestures you could get from the cashier. Talk to one, he says, and a whole life can shift: \u201cI got a friend at the grocery store,\u201d he says, acting out the thought process. \u201cI can\u2019t be out here murdering.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n