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Wood isn\u2019t one to let an opportunity slip through his fingers. \u201cI ain\u2019t from the land of dreams,\u201d he told me this past fall. He was raised in Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., and his father was Roy Wood Sr., a radio-journalism pioneer who reported on Black platoons in Vietnam, South African apartheid and the civil rights movement for the Black Chicago radio station WVON before helping found the National Black Network, the first Black-owned radio news service, where he was the news director. His mother, Joyce Dugan, was a respected teacher. Though his parents were highly regarded in the community, Wood\u2019s childhood was sometimes shaped by a sense of scarcity and limitation. \u201cWe were raised by people who were fortunate to be able to vote, to drink from the same water fountain,\u201d Wood said. \u201cThey were so exhausted from that battle that all they wanted was a house and a fair wage. The idea of dreaming beyond that was not commonplace, and in a lot of instances it was frowned upon. In the South, you dare<\/em> to dream beyond the horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n His father\u2019s work presented one model for how Wood might dare to dream. When he enrolled at Florida A&M University in 1996, he decided he wanted to work in broadcast journalism, a major that required he take classes in public speaking. He discovered that every time he spoke in front of his classmates, he got laughs without even trying. Wood liked the feeling those laughs gave him, and he started studying the acts of comedians like Adele Givens, Sinbad, Chris Rock and D.L. Hughley. George Carlin, he says, was canon for the fearlessness of his topics and concision with which he expressed opinions that audiences might otherwise find outr\u00e9. \u201cI used to listen to \u2018You Are All Diseased\u2019 once a week, listening to the wordplay and the inflections. It was just perfect. Then I would immediately throw on some Master P.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1998, Wood was arrested after buying clothing with stolen credit cards and was suspended indefinitely from Florida A&M. This youthful indiscretion yielded an unexpected blessing: Wood still received the financial aid he would have used for his tuition, and that money \u2014 along with a job as a server at the buffet restaurant Golden Corral in Tallahassee \u2014 bankrolled his fledgling comedy career. He took buses across the South, sleeping in bus stations between gigs. When he returned to Birmingham to perform at an open mic at the Stardome, one of his mother\u2019s students saw him and told her about it. She was infuriated and insisted that he focus on getting back in school. Wood eventually did, and even graduated, but he didn\u2019t quit stand-up. Instead he drove out \u2014 in a car his mother bought \u2014 to cities like Charlotte, sleeping in the passenger seat when he had to. Sometimes, when venues canceled on him, he would take day-labor jobs on construction sites to pay for gas.<\/p>\n Wood\u2019s style was molded by the difficulty of finding his voice in Black clubs across the South. His own middle-class experience of Blackness wasn\u2019t necessarily aligned with his audience\u2019s, and his early jokes \u2014 routines about the annoyance of a roommate\u2019s eating your food, for example \u2014 didn\u2019t always land. Working those rooms taught him how to craft observational humor in a way that would resonate for everyone from older Black professionals to gang members. But he also learned not to talk down to people. \u201cA Black audience will go with you anywhere on any journey,\u201d he said, \u201cif you make it funny.\u201d He learned to embrace his off-kilter humor without condescending. \u201cThat\u2019s what I know about,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know about selling weed. That\u2019s not my experience, and my job as a comedian is to present to you my<\/em> experience. And mine is a weird one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n