Roy Wood Jr. performs at Chicago’s Thalia Hall on April 15, 2017
Roy Wood Jr. stopped by Thalia Hall on April 15 for a night of stand-up that had the Chicago audience rolling with laughter. The comedian, who recently dropped his first hour-long special — Father Figure — on Comedy Central back in February, brought an abundance of material to the venue, riffing on everything from politics to racism, customer service to relationships.
Wood kicked things off by playfully calling attention to opener Rebecca O’Neal, who strategically sipped wine from a straw throughout her solid set earlier in the night. Wood admitted to enjoying wine himself… just not in a public setting. A hilarious bit ensued in which the comedian voiced disdain for the bothersome questions that always seem to follow from showing up at a friend’s house with a bottle of wine. His retort that it’s “free grapes” from the nearest gas station that “pairs well with Cheetos” proved priceless as it left the crowd nearly in tears.
Wood has a knack for pulling the absolute most from jokes. He engages his audience with skillfully-crafted yet casual storytelling methods, which fuse his well-rounded range of emotion with a hilarious intermittent physical component, allowing him to foster an additional layer of audience engagement that oftentimes proves to be precisely on-point. Nowhere was his skill set better on display Saturday night than during his bits about relationships, where he discussed in great detail the importance of being in sync, with regard to temperature, with your partner. “Find you somebody you thermostatically compatible with,” quipped the comedian.
Customer service was another hot topic over the course the night with Wood calling attention to the irrelevance of the theater ticket-ripper position and offering up a laugh-inducing impersonation of a stressed out McDonald’s cashier attempting to find the “no tomatoes” button while ringing up an order. The comedian’s anecdote about being hassled for a discount card in the grocery store checkout line was also particularly funny. “I don’t have the discount card. I just want to leave.” pleads Wood to a venue full of laughs. “I want to leave so bad I’d rather pay full price.”
One of the many highlights of Wood’s set was his hysterical examination of Donald Trump, who he coined the “Pied Piper of Racism.” He vocalized sympathy for “real racists,” saying he felt sorry for them having to share the spotlight with the less authentic Trump-supporting “red hat bandwagon bigots.” Another highlight came in the form of a story about a friend of Wood’s who at age 39 began selling dope. The bit prompted references to iconic TV characters like Tony & Christopher from The Sopranos and Avon Barksdale & Stringer Bell from The Wire, used to illustrate the drug-dealing levels that should be attained by middle age.
Rebecca O’Neal performs at Chicago’s Thalia Hall on April 15, 2017
Wood wasn’t the only one to bring up The Wire on Saturday night as the HBO classic was among the many references thrown about by opener O’Neal (seen above), who also peppered her fast-paced set with a handful of funny, offbeat callbacks to films like I Robot and the beloved Shawshank Redemption. The Chicago-based comedian and host of WCIU’s Chicago’s One Night Stand-Up cracked up those in attendance with stories about her addiction to Planet Fitness and jokes about women’s breasts which, while noting their true role as a source for milk, she admits also have “a dope side hustle.”
Roy Wood Jr. performs at Chicago’s Thalia Hall on April 15, 2017
Comedy fans in search of laughs on the South Side certainly found them at Wood’s Thalia Hall set on Saturday night. Those looking for more from the Birmingham, Alabama-born comedian can get a taste of his new special Father Figure here. You can also catch him on The Daily Show, where he appears as a routine correspondent, and on Comedy Central’s May 3rd episode of The Comedy Jam, where he’ll be performing Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business.”
(Photos by Laurie Fanelli)