Wanda Sykes’ Vancouver fans are in for a treat.
Along with fellow headliners Trevor Noah and Lewis Black, the legendary curly haired, crackly-voiced comedian will be in town for this months’ inaugural Just For Laughs NorthWest comedy fest. Only Sykes won’t be doing just any old set. Instead, the sharp-witted comic will be serving up a sneak preview of her newest stand-up special as she lays out material for the as-yet-unnamed hour.
Set to be filmed in Los Angeles in May, it will be the first special for Sykes since 2009’s uproarious HBO session, I’ma Be Me.
“I probably have over two hours of material right now,” says Sykes, speaking by phone from New York, where she is in town to check out some comedy shows. “But it’s not until I go, alright, what’s in the show, what’s the name, what’s the idea? And make sure I have all the pieces there. Then I go okay, this is feeling kind of special – it doesn’t feel like I’m just doing a set, this feels special […] and I’m there now.”
You might know her best as Wanda from Curb Your Enthusiasm or Rita from Evan Almighty (or as the voice of many a sassy animated character), but Sykes’ stand-up CV is as pure as it is formidable.
Unsatisfied with the relative security of her job as a procurement specialist for the National Security Agency, Sykes began performing at open mics and talent showcases around Washington, DC, in the late ‘80s. By 1992 she had made the leap to New York City, where she met Chris Rock and caught the big break of opening for him at Caroline’s Comedy Club. In 1997, Rock hired her to be a writer on his show – a stint for which she and the rest of the writing team garnered four Primetime Emmy nominations and one win.
After that, Sykes built a career divided between comedy tours, television roles (where she often plays some version of herself), and movies.
The stage is where she truly reveals herself, though. While Sykes’ time under Rock could be called formative, her material is rooted in her own reality, with the politically minded comic serving up brash and blunt observations on sex, race and bikini waxes that are as enlightening as they are amusing.
Carving out a voice as a female comic in the ‘90s wasn’t as simple as being funny and having famous friends, however. Sykes – now one of the most recognizable and beloved comedians on the circuit – acknowledges that she had to push through the same years of sexism and lack of opportunity that many female comedians encounter.
“Starting out, it was always the club booker didn’t want to put two women on the same show,” she recalls. “For some reason, you could have six guys on a show, but for a spot he’d be like, ‘Oh, I’ve already got a woman on tonight.’
“Like, what does that mean?” she continues, indignantly. “It was always that. For some reason they thought that if there was more than one woman on the show the audience would, like, run out? I don’t know… Or we were all going to talk about the same thing, or something?” she says. “That was the hardest part.”
Despite the roadblocks, though, Sykes can be counted in the exclusive club of comedians who have had their own late-night talk show, with 2009’s strong but short-lived Wanda Sykes Show on Fox.
And while the talk show only lasted one season, television has always been a friend to Sykes. Between 2006 and 2010 she put in 67 episodes on the Julia Louis-Dreyfus vehicle The New Adventures of Old Christine, and can currently be seen on ABC’s hit show Black-ish (playing what she gleefully describes as “the office crazy person”), as well as guest starring on the fifth season of Showtime Comedy’s House of Lies alongside Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda).
“It was crazy. I got an email from my agent saying, ‘Don Cheadle would like your number; can I give it to him?’” she explains. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, you can give it to him! You can give him my Social Security number, I don’t care!’”
It’s that lightheartedness and generosity of spirit that has likely helped carry Sykes to her success, while also informing her position as a prominent role model among the LGBT community.
While out privately for many years, Sykes (who had previously been married to record producer Dave Hall) famously came out publicly in 2008 while speaking at a gay rights rally in Las Vegas. The spontaneous announcement was reportedly prompted by anger and disappointment at the passage of Proposition 8 – the California law banning gay marriage – and by the fact that she had just gotten married to her same-sex partner, Alex Niedbalski, a few weeks earlier.
Since then, Sykes has performed as part of Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours Tour for LGBT rights, as well appeared in the Think Before You Speak television campaign, which aimed to address homophobic slang amongst teens. She was also the first African-American woman as well as the first openly gay entertainer to host the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and won a GLAAD award in 2010 for promoting equal rights for gays and lesbians.
“I think [the activism] is because I actually visit with some of these kids who are in situations where they’re either abused or they’ve been kicked out of their homes for being LGBT, and my heart just goes out to them,” Sykes explains. “I just can’t imagine the people who are supposed to take care of you and love you unconditionally kick you out and turn their backs on you. So I just feel obligated and want to try to help their situation.”
It’s something Sykes experienced herself, as an adult, with her own conservative parents.
“It was hard,” Sykes recalls, of coming out. “At the time my mother was coming to visit and [over the phone] I was like, ‘Hey look, this is the situation…’ and I was surprised that she didn’t know what the situation was. So there was a big fall out, and it was rough for several years.”
Most publicly, Sykes’ parents declined to attend her wedding.
Meanwhile, one year later, Niedbalski gave birth to a pair of fraternal twins, Olivia and Lucas, and Sykes became a mother without having yet reconciled with her parents.
Her feelings about those early years bubble up memorably in Gay vs Black, a poignantly perfect joke from I’ma Be Me that explains how she never had to deal with “coming out as black” to her mom.
Time eventually healed their estrangement, and Sykes says her mom and dad are now loving their new role as grandparents. Neither they, nor the rest of Sykes’ growing family are any more safe from becoming stand-up fodder, though.
“The kids, the whole family’s in the act,” she confirms, with a laugh.
“A lot of [the new material] is just looking at how did I get to this place where I am right now,” the 51-year-old goes on to explain. “Because, really, if you had asked me 20 years ago, ‘Hey, did you think you’d be married to a French woman and raising white kids?’ I’d be like… ‘No.’”
• Wanda Sykes performs as part of JFL NorthWest on Feb. 24 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton). Tickets at JFLNorthWest.com
