This week on LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, comedian, host of CNN’s Have I Got News For You, and author of the new memoir The Man of Many Fathers, Roy Wood Jr. joins Mark Malkoff to talk late-night breaks, near-misses, and knowing when to walk away.
Wood recalls the moment that changed everything: a breakout set at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival. “As I’m walking off stage, I meet the booker for Letterman… three months later I’m on Letterman.” The night itself was pure terror—“I was petrified at Letterman”—until a backstage run-in with baseball llegend Pete Rose snapped him out of it. “He was kind of rude,” Wood says, “but it gave me just enough anger to forget about being nervous.”
He’s candid about striking out on his first Daily Show audition (“I definitely bombed”) and how things clicked years later under Trevor Noah.
When he decided to leave in 2023, Wood says it came down to timing and trust. “I don’t quite feel safe here in the long term,” he explains, noting that election years are when networks greenlight new political shows—so he stepped away, and soon enough, CNN came calling.
Hosting Have I Got News For You suits him perfectly. “Everything you see on that show is pretty much 90% ad-libbed,” he says, calling it the rare news-comedy format that plays to his instinct for real-time reaction and chemistry.
Elsewhere in the episode, Wood talks about Conan O’Brien’s early encouragement, the odd rhythm of block-shooting The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and why performing at the Apollo still tops the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for pressure.
Click the embed at the top of this post to watch now, or find Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Wood’s new book, The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir hits bookstores today.
