Parenthood is a fraught business for anybody, for as many reasons as there are parents. For comedian Roy Wood Jr., welcoming a son in 2016 meant confronting complex dynamics with his absentee (now deceased) father, celebrating the village of men who have shaped his worldview as an adult, and setting the intention to parent—and mentor—with thoughtfulness, honesty, and a healthy dose of humor.
Wood wrote about these experiences in The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir (Crown, October) and discussed them with ALA President-Elect Sam Helmick at a June 29 session of the 2025 American Library Association’s Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia.
“Having your first kid unlocks something emotionally,” he said. “I started reflecting on everything I wanted to do as a father, ideas I didn’t learn from my dad, and made a list of the people who had influenced me.” Some of the most surprising names on that list, for him, were the older comedians for whom he opened on the road when he was starting out in standup. It wasn’t formal mentorship in the traditional sense (“show up on this day, deliver wisdom,” rinse, repeat) but small moments that inspired him to keep showing up for younger peers when he could.
As a longtime Daily Show correspondent and now host of Have I Got News for You, Wood said he is learning to reconcile competing realities; for example, his dad, who was largely absent through his childhood, was a pioneering Black journalist covering the civil rights movement. When Wood hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner—one of the highest-profile gigs in American comedy—in 2023, he took a moment to acknowledge the Black journalists in the room.
“It hit me, when I think about what I care about in comedy, what I stand for, I’m just a funny version of him,” he said. “I go where things are messed up and try to call them out. That realization made me want to dig deeper into who he was, so I could recognize what of him lives in me—and pass that on to my son.”
He tied storytelling, whether standup, memoir, or library collections writ large, to broader efforts to advocate for people and issues you care about. “To me, advocacy isn’t about pushing yourself to emotional or physical exhaustion,” he said. “It’s about being present, showing up, doing your part, and knowing that sometimes just being seen—or helping someone else be seen—is enough.”
