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Welcome to Beyond the Scene. It's the podcast that goes deeper to topics and segments that normally air on the Daily Show. This this is what you gotta think about this podcast as all right, So, like we like eggs, right, everybody love it egg This is an omelet. You got the eggs, that's the Daily Show. But then we come in and we give you a little We sprinkle in some crumbled up sausage, we put in some green peppers, we put it in onion, cheese, all types of stuff
to make something even better for you. Today is kind
of a different type of episode. This is a topic we don't we haven't had a chance to get into on the Daily Show just yet, but we want to talk about the White House Correspondence to Dinner that I had the pleasure of hosting not too long ago, and I want to get into it with some of the writers so we can go into I guess showing you all the process of what it's like creating that type of script, what it's like creating that type of show, and you know what, I think it would be a
joy if we first heard a couple of clips from the correspondence Jenner. Before we get into everything, roll the clip. Yo, look good, you're dressed nice, You got the nice threads on, you got the jewelry glistening. Look like everybody got a little piece of that settlement money from Fox News. And that's all I have to say about that, because I'm not gonna have dominion on my ass. I love to me. Matter of fact, let me just say right now, my
favorite voting machine is dominion voting machines. When I go to the polls, I make sure it is a dominion machine that I use. If your election need the truth, put dominion in your booth.
Us.
We should be inspired by the events in France. They rioted when the retirement age went up two years to sixty four. They rioted because they didn't want to work till sixty four. Meanwhile, in America we have an eighty year old man begging us for four more years of work, begging, begging. Okay, so those were some of the highlights. We might even get into a few more a little later on than
the show. Before I get the writers in here and add them to the program, let me just say that politics is crazy in this world, and things change so so fast. Like, as a performer, you cannot do this without writers. Last week Donalandman got fired, Tucker Carlson got fired, there was all the stuff with the Fox dominion vote settlement, and then this week Smartly seeing Inn well played, announced after the Correspondence Dinner that they are going to have
Donald Trump on their network doing a town hall. So yo, man, If the Correspondence Dinner was a couple of days away, Yo, it would have been a whole different situation. So when you're in a media landscape where things are changing so so so so fast, it's hard to always find a joke that hits what is basically a constantly moving target or the American zeitguy. So it's my pleasure to talk a little bit about this today. We're gonna answer a
couple questions. I know some people ask some stuff and my social media comments about the Correspondence dinner, so maybe we'll get to some of that. But first let's meat the writers with me in the studio. I'm joined by Daily Show writer David Angelo.
Hello, David, Hey Royd, it's great to be here today. Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you. I'm joined by another writer that wrote with me on The Correspondence Dinner. He was formerly a writer for the nightly show on This Beautiful, Beautiful Paramount Plus Network as a wonderful work and stand up comedian as well Filonia's monk, you're.
Doing, I'm here? I'm here.
Yeah, that is the blackest answer I've ever heard, Like, how you doing?
To get you here?
I woke up and din't get shot yet, you.
Know, I got to my back hurt a little bit, but I'm making it out.
Here and also joining us. I don't know if she's still an investigative reporter, former investigative reporter, former writer for the Daily Show, Christiana and Backway Medina, who was our head writer. How you doing, Christiana?
Hi Roy, I'm great.
How are you?
So? Let's unpack this because I've been tweeted a bunch of quite actually, I've been tweeted a lot of ship I can't read on that air, but I have been sent a couple of questions that I think people had about the actual writing process in the assembly of the Correspondence Center. Because I've never been on the inside of the at all, I can't speak to the three of you. Angela. I don't know if you've written on any of them in the past or anything.
Yeah, I did it with Hassan and with Trevor.
What was that? Like? What was what would you say? Is the difference then between the three processes because I don't know how to approach this, like because to me, the thing that was weird was that I don't I've never used writers for stand up right like I use writers in the show, so there's some degree of trust.
But when I got the call about this, Christiana was literally the first person I called, because I'm like, all right, I know we can find funny people, but you usually had arguments within the Daily Show that I agreed with that were fair, like building the actual structure in the north star of it. So for me, I wanted to build from what am I trying to say? And now how can I make that funny? Which is how I
build my stand up. But like with Hassan and Trevor, like, was the construction process the same or was it?
Like I mean, everyone was a little different. This one was like probably the least number of people working on it, so I think it went tighter. I think everything was a little more like organized and sync like that. The other one, like Trevor's. There were so many people involved that it was kind of like I didn't really even know what was happening. Sometimes it's like I was sort
of on the periphery. And then Hassan, it was kind of just like, uh, I mean, I barely remember, but he had kind of like a head writer, sort of like how Christiana, Like he had this guy yeah, and he sort of just kind of would ask for jokes and then we'd get the joke. It wasn't that different from this one. Actually, it was kind of the same sort of thing.
I had no idea what to put together. And then Filonius. I always respected you. I don't even you wanted them comedians, man, but I don't even remember where the fuck we met, Like it's like it was before you were at Nightly Show.
I feel like we were parlaying on Twitter some But then it's possible that we just bumped shoulders at some points around the Chicago comedy scene where you, well, you started out, but you always had takes and angles on the Nightly Show that we're like very black, like you got to dig into crates and find some amnk shit, And I'm like, okay, I know I'm gonna need some of that in the script at some point as well. And also the way you look at politics from the
perspective of a black man, which I am. It was I don't know, I just I just felt like it was essential. But like in terms of like writing for Larry Willmore, who ultimately did the correspondence Dinner as well, around that, there was some overlap in the time that you were at the Nightly Show. Did will Moore talk at all about this process?
Not really, but I will say one of the segments that I was able to do for with Larry we made light of him calling former President Obama, I can say the N word? Can I say the N word?
Oh yeah, I ain't.
Know if I can say nigga? He called him nigga, and so we had a play off of that in a segment that I did where I said, you know, you're my brother of sub Saharian content and he was like, wait, did you just called me? I was like, yeah, I called you my nigga. The idea for me is, you know, we make fun of all of these spaces being extremely you know, centered on white men, but we have we have people of color in the room. The issue is always that we're writing for a specific voice, and you
can't make I can't make Jimmy Kimmel say nigga. You know what I mean. You couldn't get John John Stewart to say niggas. So when you're pushing, when you're pitching jokes, you have to think about the person who's saying the joke. So this was fun for me because I was talking to a guy over forty who had experiences in the South and in the North, who knew, you know, what it was like to do this room full of people who may not look like you but still want to
sound like yourself. So that that part to me was, you know, it was reminiscent of The Nightly Show, because that's I think what Larry Wilmore did. He presented the same format that everyone else that presented. He just tried to do with a little bit of color.
So Christiana, having taken everybody's jokes, and then let me just give the viewers an understanding of me and Christianna's relationship over the last two weeks, because really, if we're being real about this, we wrote this on a three week runway.
It was quick. This was the quickest turnaround of the.
Three outs, I feel like we had some loose suggestions a month out. But the problem was that my guest hosting week for Daily Show ran three weeks before this, and I was so focused on getting ready for content and stuff and segments for my guest week. I couldn't split my mind into two partitions. I just go fuck it. The day after Fridday, morning after guest hosting, We're going
to really dig in, and I started. The process was essentially I would take whatever we had written in a big Google doc that we were all sharing with the other writers, and I would take that and boil that down to a little bit of herbiage, take that out into the comedy clubs at night. Whatever didn't work, that's what I would change in the scripts, and that to Christiana.
She would look at it in the morning, get it back to the writers, wh would do punch up, and by the time I looked at the script again at eight o'clock at night, I could rejigger everything and then go back out from eleven o'clock to one in the morning. So I was essentially sleeping I don't know, probably three four hours a night. And then Angelo was kind enough to come out on one of those nights and kind
of give tweaks and move stuff around. But it was a lot of just Christiana and send in the audio to Christiana of every single show that I did, and just agreeing like what joke worked, what didn't work, what the crowd didn't respond to, and then just going from there. But what are your from what we constructed, Christiana? What are some of your takeaways from the correspondence? Jenner?
You know, it's so interesting when like our initial conversation a couple months back, was it February, Like time means nothing to me right now. It was we had all of these people we wanted to hit. We were like, oh, Marjorie Taylor Green, and we should do some t J. Holmes and Amy, and we should like they because they were in the zeitgeist. They were in the news so prominently, and it was kind of like the Gift and the cursed.
We just kept getting the gift of being used.
That meant we would just have to just rip up what we had or you know, what we were trying to say. And then obviously, you know, the Trump arrangement happened and that changed a lot, I think, And then yeah, Elon just seemed irrelevant what was happening at Elon and Twitter, even though when you got the gig it was a.
Pretty big story, is what everyone was talking about.
And then Bloody Monday where Tucker and Don lost their jobs.
It was just like, there's no.
Way we can't open with Fox Dominion and into these massive firings. So I'm happy with how it went, but the reshuffling and the re sinking and listening to the audio, and then it's funny because I was listening to all of it so religiously. What would get a hard laugh like the week before in light of everything that happened the next week, Oh, we don't really care about that.
You know.
You could just feel the temperature changing as the news cycle went, so it was like a real gift. But it just meant that we were messaging you on WhatsApp literally why you were sitting.
Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that a little bit. We'll get well, we'll get to that in a little bit. Let's let's watch a clip real quick from the correspondence dinner. Don't give it up a dark branding, Oh this joke? Oh shit, happy to be here real quick, misprais, and I think you left some of your classified documents up there. You can get the Yeah, no, don't give him to him. I'll put him in a safe place. He don't know where to keep him. Amast. We never ran that joke, yeah, Brandon, the document joke.
Brandon, Yeah, the document joke. Never on it.
Now, I remember watching that, I think, and I don't recall that in the document he's freestyling.
No, no, no, like that was he.
Pitched it in the day, right, Roy, You were like, yeah, because both the property brothers. Yeah, that's what happened the whole thing.
So for the people who't know, the White House Correspondence Association gives us a list of the confirmed guest but you don't know who's gonna show up or not. And we were told from the jump there would only be one property brother, only one property brother. So the initial opening line was greetings, distinguished members of the media, our
greatest leaders, and a property brother. And then I go down to COVID testing that morning, I fucking see the other property brother and I'm like, you gotta be shitting me. What the fuck are we going? How do we?
Like?
Yeah, yeah, So we start trying to figure out a new open and that's what we ended up coming up with, and that ended up being way funnier then the Property Brother line. Then I find out from one of our other writers, Matt Naggering, that Doctor Fauci was there, because you all are at the table or whatever, just checking Twitter and looking at stuff, and they're sending me jokes
in real time. At the table, they go, Fauci's here, and I go, oh, perfect, we'll sneak him in behind the Property Brother joke and just fucking go from there. So it's a pleasure to be here amongst our country's greatest leaders distinguished media organizations, both Property Brothers and Doctor Fauci. If you see Fauci tak a picture with them, that's
show new booster shots all right. After the break, I guess we should talk more about the actual night and the jokes and the people, And I guess I should tell y'all, Oh, I'll tell you who loves me. Now, I'll tell.
You that I'm saying after the break not you.
Will not guess this person fucking loves me. You don't even understand. It's beyond the scenes. We'll be right back. Beyond the scenes. We are back. We're talking about the White House Correspondence Dinner, which I had the honor of being a part of, And we're here with some of the writers and head writer from that evening. Before we do anything else, let's just go into a quick clip of some of the best jokes from that evening, and then I want to come back and get y'all's opinion.
I'm gonna go around the horn and find out which joke that y'all think was gonna bomb. One of them did bomb. They ain't hating another. Right, First the clip the untouchable Tucker Carlson is out of a job. Now, Okay, some people celebrate it, but to Tucker's staff, I want you to know that I know what you're feel I work at the Daily Show, so I too have been blindsided by the sudden departure of the host of a
fake news program. But can we just all acknowledge? Can we just all be honest and just say that the Trump arrests didn't hit like we thought it was gonna hit. What's so desensitized the scandals now that Trump arrest it didn't do what I thought it was gonna do.
The Trump arrest was like a pot brown and.
You ate four hours ago.
And you are do I feel justice?
This gonna feel like justice.
Let me try one of them, Georgia Raemond Brown is maybe that'll hit. Okay, that one's ask got some kick to it. I think Republicans y'all would be surprised. Man, if y'all would just be real about what CRT is, that you.
Can be surprised.
Some black folks might might meet your halfway. But you got to tell the truth. You can't lie to black people. Call it what it is. Anti CRT policies are an attack on black history and an attempt to erase the contribution of black people from the history book. That's what it is. You are trying to erase black people, and a lot of black people wouldn't mind some of that erasure as long as that black person is Clarence Thomas. Okay, all right, So a lot of good jokes in there.
Thank y'all for the assistance. Oh and also shout out shout out to Matt Nagre and Lily Brumkin. We're talking Khalia. What's Kalia's last name? I write as assistant And so of all of the jokes that we did, the joke that I thought would get a laugh or a clap, and it got neither was the joke about this is America. We don't make laws. We make a promise to pass the law, then we don't do anything. I thought that would get something.
It got something in the club, Roy I.
Did.
If there's one person that could use the scandal, it's Ron DeSantis. That boy is just running around just passing every controversial law he can think of, thinking that's gonna activate voters. That's not how you activate voters in this country.
Ron.
Everybody know how you do politics.
It is a miracle. We don't pass laws. You make a promise to voters and then you don't do it. That's what the great leaders in this room understand.
You know how to make things not happen.
I want to say.
I was like, runn then the line. Then the line was, that's what you all understand. Y'all are the best at not making things happen. And do you remember the original line, Christiana, because that was the softer version. The original line was that's why you're all in this room.
Because you're the best line, and I was like, Y can't say that, but.
I but saying you're the best at not making it Wow, that was it got nothing. It got nothing, and like in my head, as soon as it came out of my mouth, I was like, fuck her. She was right.
But you know what, you know what I realized as a comic, you thought, because when I read it, I was like, oh, this is hilarious. Because my brain can only see me performing that joke and making it work. It didn't cross my mind that this wasn't a room that you were going to be able to with a facial expression or a change in tone. You weren't going to be able to make it work because they were focused on what you were saying more than how you were saying it, which I'm not used to that.
They're like Hilton, They're like five drinks in right, so like those type of like really nuanced, like I think by the time it landed, we can't be bother to laugh.
Let me ask that was it? That's what I felt it was.
And at that point in the night, they were already getting their orders from the CIA for the tomorrow's broadcasts, you know what they needed to say, so they were distracted.
Although you did it, You did that joke in the club. I worked in the club.
When I called them the best liars in the club.
It was great because it wasn't about them that audience.
Yeah, constituents joke the people like that you said it to them about them, and they were like, well, isn't that part of it?
Isn't that part of the balance though. You're playing to the room, but you're also keenly aware that the constituents are watching this, right, and you're trying to make the room feel But the clips that are going viral aren't necessarily the ones that killed in the room. It's the ones that the constituents connected with the most, are the ones that they're repeated, right, Yeah, that's true.
I want to hear what you jokes were like, that one's gone.
I'm glad you said that.
I think it's funny.
But I don't even know that was one of them, the one that you just mentioned that I was heavily that my fingerprints were on. I really was not. I wasn't sure or specifically, because I knew that the BMF and the power lines were very specific to a particular demographic, and I didn't think that was a room full of that demographic. But I also thought.
The people who watch BMF and power are very dedicated, but it is not that.
But I also but that was my My thinking was the same way that room won't get the BMF reference, the people who watch BMF won't get the succession reference. And that's the issue there. But I knew that somebody who there would be one one power viewer, one BMF watcher who will go, hey man. They mentioned Big Meach and that that was all I wanted. I felt like you. I felt like you reached out to me specifically for
that joke. He was like, put something real, specifically, blackness only gonna be for them seventeen people, and that's.
What we did, so right after a vander Pump.
People and which turned it into one point seven million people don't forget. Oh yeah, that's what we need.
But here's the thing. The thing with that, though, was that even with fifty cent right, fifty cent reposted that part of the joke because he's an executive producer and co creator on those two series. The line after about Biden we got to replace Chuck Across and millions of Americans don't know why they hate you, and then they cut to Biden's face. I never saw that. Yeah, I remember, I'm gonna say I don't see the cutaway shots. I
don't see any of that. So Biden's reaction to the joke was almost like a punch up tag to the joke, like in and of itself, because I didn't know. He had this surprise look on his face, like, what the fuck did you just Tucker got caught up? Got caught up like that dude from Vanda Pump Rules text message stuff. I don't know what vander Pump Rules is about. I'm just watching it. A couple of times. My friends told me it's like BMF but for white people. Or is
that secession? No, secession is power for white people. No, Tucker crossing is power for white people. No, that's white power.
You know it.
Never mind, I don't worry about that. But no, don't know about that. We got to get Tucker back on the air, mister president, because right now there's millions of Americans that don't even know why they hate you.
That was an angela, if I'm not mistaken.
He didn't move for like two seconds.
Sorry, And I knew Biden would be bewildered when you said his name, so I kind of I kind of worked it in.
That was part of the architecture.
All right, what about you, Angela, give me give me one.
I was trying to look because I forget. But the the I thought everything was, I expected kind of everything to work because we went through it. I think the school shooting one was the most, like the biggest question mark about how they'd.
Who gave me the Kanye joke that I didn't do because I just didn't want that heat.
I didn't give it to you, said.
A blend of that was a blend of myself and Lily was about to get me. And then Lily was like, maybe you shouldn't do it.
It worked in the clubs. It worked in the clubs. It was coming off of the BT joke. Mark. I'm not sure if you were on board yet by the time we dropped the Kanye jokes, which is probably for the best because you would have tagged it maybe even more can. But the joke was about it was come off of BT. BT Tyler Perry is sinking about buying BT and that's how broke These companies are there thinking about giving be et back to black people. And then the tag was Roy, don't say the.
Joke, not not don't say the joke.
Let me let me navigate as a white ally, let me navigate this.
The joke.
Generally speaking, generally speaking, it was you know, it was a joke about Kanye in his in his anti Semitism, which was in the news, and how like he says, you know that you all were familiar that the Jews run the media. That was the Kanye thing, and so the joke was about how they were selling it to a black person and that didn't fit with Kanye's.
Proving Kanye's theories were wrong. Yeah, yeah, see, thank you. See Christiano, we gotta do that. Just fine. We all still got jo.
But you didn't say it. Angelo did, so I was right.
But yet we felt like we ended up paying that for length. And then also because the audience does not know me as a comedian. That's the other hurdle I was dealing with, is that even if you only know me from the Daily Show, I know you don't know my stand up because my first two specials was on the Comedy Central app and you know this is before Paramount Plus saved us and gave us you know, I'm just being real, like, so I can't assume that you know my heart as a comedian.
Yeah, and when you're doing all this weird political stuff, like you don't have the time to make them trust you and what you're saying, or even before you get to the punchline, they're gonna get tense because you know how people have like yeah, and then they are already like, oh we heard this word, you know, so that they just start doing their Pavlovian thing and it loses the room. That's why I thought, you know, whether it's a point that is good with Kanye and this and that it's
just more like I think in Christianity. You agree, it was just like it It was too much like math for the room for not the payoff.
Come see me loud.
But you know, you know what I will say, watching watching that says though, was interesting for me as a stand up because I don't think about that while I'm doing stand up. I think about whether or not the joke will work. Is the joke funny? Is the joke funny? And do I stand by the joke? And so to kind of see you guys have this insight to what will lose the room before you do the joke is different from me that but but I think you're right, like hearing the joke I'm like that the joke is tame,
that will kill in a comedy club. But I could see how today was going to be a bunch of he supports Kanye Western, he made the jewser, and that would have been that would have been detrimental to what you accomplished worth it?
Yeah, yeah, because it was strategic, like what where will we lose the room because we're gonna do that.
You want to do it if you're going to do what you want to do it for something better than that, particularly such a good joke, but that's not the one you want to lose. Yeah, Then shooting joke was a joke where you're like, we're gonna say it, that's a yeah right.
Well, so that's the thing, and it's that thought that we like, we knew there were certain moments where the room would not be behind us, but we felt that the final twenty five percent, when Roy did his Kumbai a thing as we started calling it, would bring them back because then they would be like, see that Roy is rooted in more than just like kind of like comedy and provocative ideas he kind of comes from.
I thought that was the best of it. I thought that was the most important moment of the ent. I thought it was funny. I thought it was everything. But once I saw that version, because that wasn't the original version I saw in the Google doc that was added.
It wasn't four or five that it evolved.
That part was that was to me that changed.
It was a back and forth right Roy, because initially it was too I felt it was too long, and I said it that to Roy with a bunch of cuts.
Yeah, that was too emotional.
I was like, I love the mom's stuff, but we need to figure out the dad's stuff. But the way it was compressed came away people came away feeling like, oh, he really sincerely cares. And then it tied into the broader theme of like these scandals and the fact that you know what's going on with the press that we're not necessarily talking about. But I was just concerned, especially since that BT joke.
Was so up top. It was like one of the opening after like just agreeting.
I was like, yo, if he loses them at that point, then you bomb. Yeah, And I'm aware that we're playing to different constituencies, and my feeling was whatever goes viral, if the clip is a room full of people not laughing.
It's just like, yeah, you're bombing.
Even if the person watching it is like this BMF joke is hilarious, But if no one's laughing, it's like is it funny?
And I just didn't want that.
And it was hard because we're constantly doing those calculations of like, okay, we're playing to the room, and in the room there's like this big ideological division. You know, there's politicians and then there's the press. Then you got someone from vander Pump Rules and the people at home. I'm a brother fanatic, so I was trying to get a Housewives or vander Pump Rules in there somewhere, but like the rest of the room don't know what the
hell that is, you know. So it was just like and we're like, oh yeah, and then we want we want the people in the Shade Room to have something that they laughed about. That was like we had a Shade room joke here initially, Roy remember, but that we lost.
That we lost such a time, but then Shade Room picked up the Kamlo joke. Okay, after the break, I will wrap up this conversation with some of my wonderful, wonderful writers from the White House Correspondence Dinner and the Lovely I don't even even know why they call it a speech. It's a performance. We'll be right back as we wrap up here because I want to hold you all up. I'm going to tell you the one person
who loved the set that I was shot. But then it could be the bridge we need to bring the Correspondence Dinner back to being a beautiful bipartisan evening of roasting at the Seat b S party Kelly Anne Conway.
Oh wow, oh my god.
And I don't know if that's success or failure.
We don't know what.
Say.
Ye like a bit of color, so you know I should I call you?
See now, you'll have been twisted into something freaky. That's enough. Somebody asked me this earlier. Would you do this again?
Depends on who the host is there?
Oh no, if it's you, yes, but I'm not doing this again.
No for you, Yes, I do it for you somebody else. Well that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much, David, and hello Christiana and Bacway, Medina, and thank you Felonious Monk. Thank you all for going beyond the scenes weekly. See you next time. Listen to the daily Show beyond the scenes on Apple podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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