two friends June 1, 2020

Roy Wood Jr. and Jimmy O. Yang Barely Survived Middle School

Portrait of Anne Victoria Clark

By Anne Victoria Clark, a Vulture writer who covers comedy and TV

Please don’t use Roy Wood Jr.’s green-screen background to make it look like he’s somewhere silly. The Daily Show correspondent joined Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang from his mother’s garage, where he’s set up his at-home studio, making this episode of Two Friends: A Nice Time Hanging Out With People Who Know Each Other Well particularly ripe for parody. The two pals talked about working on Netflix’s latest comedy, Space Force, together, with Yang letting viewers know which scene they can spot his real-life father in. And then they shared some memories from everyone’s favorite life stage: middle school.

When presented with the question, “What was your last fight about?” Wood had to reach pretty far back to the last time he picked a fight: eighth grade. It’s a perfect comedian origin story: A young Roy Wood Jr., attending a “stop the violence” rally, is confronted by a bully who had been bothering him for weeks. He decides that the anti-violence rally is the perfect moment to slap his tormentor, because surely someone would immediately intervene. Reader, they did not. Wood suffered a retaliatory three-piece combo with a punch right to the face, deciding perhaps in that moment to stick to words from then on. Yang fared a bit better, though, landing the first and only “roundhouse kick” he’s ever attempted on a junior high school bully who’d pushed him too far, with a “karate chop” to boot. While Yang has never studied martial arts, he allowed his fellow schoolmates to draw their own conclusions from his lucky first try.

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Roy Wood Jr. and Jimmy O. Yang Barely Survived Middle School

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