Roy Wood Jr.

So that's the baseline for a larger conversation and joke about criminal justice reform.

That joke was the genesis point of me going,

Oh, pain is a tool.

Sorrow can also be woven into this fabric of what you're presenting.

I always thought sorrow and pain was for a one man show and for something much deeper and confessional and black box theater.

And it's like, no, you could probably do this and make it work.

Then you start looking at what Ali Sadiq has been able to do.

And the fabric that he weaves on stage with storytelling, I'd still say Ali Sadiq is the best pound for pound, joke for joke right now doing the craft.

But it just gave, that incident gave me confidence of, okay, when it makes sense to tell a story, tell a story.

I don't think I'm a full-blown storytelling comedian.

Like I don't, I don't know.

I don't, there's something uncomfortable about dealing with

emotion it's very delicate because you're manipulating the audience in a way so that part of it was i'm hesitant at times but i'd say that that third hour special is where it started and then i told another story in my fourth special lonely flowers this year which also was kind of a

You know, there's some depth to that one as well.

So, you know, you look at that and, you know, the idea of writing this book now, The Man of Many Fathers, where there's a lot of stories in that book that are painful.

There's a lot that are hilarious, but it's a few in that thing that's kind of painful, man.

And having the confidence to sit with that, you know, it's been a good thing.

Writing this book has been a great exercise in that.

I love it.

And I'm going to come to the book in two seconds, but there's two things I got to tell you and give you praise for that.