Roy Wood Jr. attends The 85th Annual Peabody Awards at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on June 1.
On a star-studded night at the Beverly Wilshire, the prestigious Peabody Awards found its ideal host in Roy Wood Jr., the former Daily Show correspondent acclaimed for his biting satire and humor. The 2025 ceremony, held in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, honored outstanding achievements across documentaries, news, entertainment, and interactive media.
Kicking off the evening with his trademark wit, Wood Jr. reflected on last year’s host, Kumail Nanjiani, before diving into the politics of representation. “The Peabodys standing up for diversity, how about that? Which means in a few months, the White House will cut their funding and so they’ll have John Mulaney, that’s on y’all.”
This year’s Peabody Awards recognized 34 groundbreaking works, including acclaimed series like Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Shogun, and Will & Harper. In his monologue, Wood Jr. applauded the courage of the honorees. “We’re celebrating the fact that everyone in this room has done one of the boldest things you can do in these times, and that is just straight up tell the truth.”
Adding a personal note, he reflected on his own exit from The Daily Show, saying, “It’s hard to create stuff about terrible things without knowing all of the terrible things. That’s why I quit. It was too much stress.” He joked about his current role at CNN’s comedy show Have I Got News for You, adding, “I ain’t got to do nothing but plug Jake Tapper’s book.”
Among the many highlights of the night was a moving tribute to Saturday Night Live, which received the Peabody Institutional Award. Jon Hamm introduced the segment by saying, “The secret sauce of the show has always been holding up a mirror and reflecting America’s culture to us, politics, contradictions, all of it, right back at you.”
SNL creator Lorne Michaels accepted the award alongside several show alumni, calling the reunion of cast members from the very first season to today “one of the most moving experiences of my life.”
The evening also featured powerful appearances by presenters Anna Kendrick, Uzo Aduba, and Randall Park. Roy Wood Jr. maintained the balance of humor and reverence, even joking with the winners to keep their speeches short, quipping, “Think of it like a Patti LuPone apology.”
Closing out the ceremony was veteran journalist Andrea Mitchell, who received the Peabody Career Achievement Award. In her speech, Mitchell recounted her decades in journalism and emphasized the role of fearless reporting in modern democracy. She invoked Thomas Jefferson’s words: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
The 2025 Peabody Awards celebrated not just excellence, but integrity and truth in storytelling. With Roy Wood Jr. at the helm, the evening delivered laughter, emotion, and a resounding tribute to the power of bold narratives.
