The Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. just found the perfect new muse for stand-up material: Georgia Republican senatorial candidate, ex-NFL player, and sentient tree nut Herschel Walker. On November 16, Walker held a rally in McDonough to mobilize voter support ahead of his upcoming runoff election against Raphael Warnock on December 6, and a viral video of his speech inspired Wood to try something new.
“You ever watch a stupid movie late at night hoping it’s gonna get better, it don’t get better, but you keep watching anyway?†Walker asks in the speech. “The other night I was watching this movie called Fright Night — or Freak Night or some kind of night — and it was about vampires. I don’t know if you know, vampires are some cool people, are they not? But I’m gonna tell you something that I found out: A werewolf can kill a vampire, did you know that? I never knew that, so I didn’t want to be a vampire anymore. I wanted to be a werewolf.†It’s uncanny how much Walker sounds like SNL’s James Austin Johnson as Trump talking about Scooby-Doo.
“Elected official? … nah. But ngl, I’d pay $25 and two drink minimum to watch an hour of this shit at the comedy club,†Wood tweeted in response to the clip. Later that night, Wood decided to put an audience’s $25 where his mouth was (so to speak) and see how Walker’s ramblings played at a comedy show. Performing at a secret show at Katz’s Delicatessen in New York, he opened his set with a word-for-word recital of Walker’s babbling, generating a smattering of laughs — albeit some confused ones — from the crowd. “And those were the exact words verbatim from Herschel Walker at his fucking campaign event!†Wood yelled at the end of the bit to huge cheers. He later joked on Twitter that he might have recited even more of the speech, but he “didn’t have enough time to memorize the whole joint.â€
Comedians and late-night hosts have been joking about Walker’s politics, hypocrisies, and incoherence since he began his senatorial campaign in August 2021. On November 12, during Dave Chappelle’s controversial SNL monologue, Chappelle called Walker “observably stupid†and said “he looks like he thinks before he makes a move in tic-tac-toe.†But as Wood has shown, the best way to mock Walker is to let his words speak for themselves. Time will tell whether he’ll become senator of Georgia on December 6. But if he loses, he’s nonetheless opened a lot of new doors for himself. As Wood points out, the “man’s got a future in comedy.â€