Rick Bragg and Roy Wood Jr. find humor in rural, urban Alabama

Best-selling author Rick Bragg grew up in rural Calhoun County.

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. grew up in Birmingham’s urban West End.

One is from the country. One is from the city. They’re both from Alabama. They are both known for finding humor amidst the pervasive poverty that existed where they grew up.

On Monday evening, December 2nd, they shared a stage at the Alys Stephens Center and told stories about their childhood. Both were honored as fellows by the Alabama Humanities Alliance.

They follow a long line of distinguished Alabama Humanities scholars, including Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Bragg, author of memoirs such as “All Over But the Shoutin'” and “The Speckled Beauty” about his recently deceased dog Speck, said he assumed the honor came to him like a bucket of popcorn at the movies. “I think they just affected us, like when someone hands you popcorn at the movie theater and all that’s left is seeds,” Bragg said.

Sid Evans, editor-in-chief of Southern Living, moderated a discussion focused on her roots in Alabama – as soon as the show got rolling. There was a delay when a fire alarm shut down the Jemison Concert Hall, leaving the audience out in the cold until a false alarm sounded.

“There are so many people here that I haven’t seen in years, the fire alarm was like a mini school reunion,” Wood said.

Bragg talked about growing up in a Jim Walter house with his mother, two brothers and his grandmother under one roof. “A two-room shell,” he said.

“I’m not one of those people who says, ‘Oh, but it gave me character,'” he said. “I’ve done enough to get what little character I have. But there were things, for example not everyone could have a bed. I slept at the foot of my grandmother’s bed, which wouldn’t be very exciting unless she had dementia. She was unwell and suffered from walking dementia. She had it for 25 years. She showered me with $1 bills and fried chicken. At night, every night, she tuned her AM radio to a station far away. Back then there was St. Louis and of course Nashville. At night I went to sleep with Hank Williams or Sam Cooke. It was terribly comforting. People say, ‘I bet you wouldn’t trade anything for these days.’ And I say, ‘Hell yeah, I would.'”

For Wood, the son of legendary Birmingham radio broadcaster Roy Wood Sr., growing up in the West End in the 1980s was rife with urban unrest.

“It was the rise of the crack and the beginning of the white flight overlapping in the same place,” Wood said. “So we had, so to speak, the last white neighbors that you had on the west side in the 80s. My dad worked at WENN in the mornings, so he was out doing the morning news, and then dad would come home during the day and sleep, and then in the evenings he would be gone to do his jazz show on WAGG. My mother worked a traditional 8-hour shift and then there was law school and graduate school somewhere. There was always something going on at night.

“So I was kind of a latchkey kid growing up. I could stay on my own. We lived in the West End near the intersection of South Park and Pearson Avenue, then about three minutes from West End High School. I was zoned because of Price. My mother lied and took me to Central Park.”

Wood’s mother, Joyce, who was in the audience, protested. “Yes you did, you lied,” he said. “You lied about wanting me in the gifted program that only existed in Central Park. You can’t take my degree away from me now, Mom. I’m 45.”

Wood graduated from Ramsay High School in 1996 and earned a degree in journalism from Florida A&M University in 2001. He returned to Birmingham to work in radio at 95.7 FM JAMZ before moving to Los Angeles in 2007. Wood became famous as a correspondent for The Daily Show on Comedy Central from 2015 to 2023.

“It was a 45-minute walk home from school every day,” Wood said of elementary school. “You foiled South Park projects, so the first thing you had to deal with was gangs beating you up for your money. Sometimes they would wait for you to go to the store. They would take your candy. If you overcome the bonds, you still have a mile to survive any rabid dog. There was always a dog. They have these thick Houghton Mifflin textbooks. Sometimes you would just lose your textbooks, fly off, and have to turn back later to get your Trapper Keeper off the road.”

It’s not safe to venture out at night, he said.

“Once you got home, you didn’t really have anywhere else to go,” Wood said. “The neighborhood began to decline. What really saved my childhood was my mom buying me a basketball goal.”

That kept him away from Powderly Park, where there was a risk of random gunfire, he said.

The Wood family had a two-car garage and a driveway shaded by tall oak trees, he said.

“In July, our driveway was 10 degrees cooler than Powderly Park,” Wood said. “That meant every horrible person from the west side came to our house to shoot hoops. But out of respect for my mother, who was working as a city educator in Birmingham at the time, and out of respect for what my father had built, their parents knew my father, even if the children didn’t know me. No nonsense has ever gone down out of respect. They would leave weapons on the street. They left alcohol on the street. They would come and shoot baskets until 8 or 9 p.m. until my mom had to start locking the rim.”

That basketball goal changed his daily life, he said.

“In sixth grade, from Central Park Elementary School to the Piggly Wiggly on Tuscaloosa Avenue in Berney Points, I did well,” Wood said. “Because if you bother me, you know you can’t come to play basketball. It really changed the dynamic with which I was able to move through very dangerous times. We lived two doors down from a house where there was evidence of drug trafficking. But our house was fine.”

As soon as Bragg could swing a shovel, he went to work for his uncle’s landscaping business, digging up rocks. The working-class people he grew up with couldn’t understand his pursuit of a career in journalism, where he eventually won a Pulitzer Prize as a writer for The New York Times.

“I was making $150 a week driving a dump truck, operating a chainsaw and lifting things,” Bragg said. “When I was 18, I quit to work for the Jacksonville News for $50 a week. Nobody could understand it. I simply told them the truth. I have worked in places where I have been shot at. I’ve covered some terrible places. But no one in the history of journalism has ever had their brains crushed by a swinging pine branch while searching for a metaphor.”

He said his family was at a loss when he left The Anniston Star and took a job at The Birmingham News, where he worked from 1985 to 1988. “I left home to go to Birmingham, which was like the dark side of the moon,” Bragg said. “You only went to Birmingham when you were dying. I think my kidney doctor is here. Don’t take it personally.”

Wood said he’s had a hard time explaining to people who think you need to get a college degree and then get a job in the field that you want to pursue comedy as a career. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Wood said. “All I know is that I enjoy it and I found a way to make a few bucks from it.”

Although Bragg has been a journalism professor at the University of Alabama for 15 years and once attended Harvard University for a year on a Nieman Scholarship, he said he has never had to deal with the expectations of a college degree.

“It’s not a problem for me because I’m still a freshman at Jacksonville State University,” Bragg said.

To watch the full conversation, click here.