The last time Wanda Sykes was booed was four days after Donald Trump got elected. The problem wasn’t her joke, which was relatively tame. “I am certain this is not the first time we’ve elected a racist, sexist, homophobic president,” she cracked. “He’s just the first confirmed one.” At the benefit gig she was playing, three white male comedians had made similar jokes, and no one had been angry with them. The problem was who was making it. “When it came out of my mouth, it was like: ‘Oh, wow, OK, so the black woman isn’t allowed to say anything,’” says Sykes. “So that’s when it hit me: ‘Oh shit, this is bad, this is bad.’”
Sykes, 54, started as a standup in the late 80s, before becoming a writer for The Chris Rock Show. This was the beginning of a writing and performing career on TV and film that has led to more than half a dozen Emmy nominations, including three for her own televised comedy specials. She appeared as a version of herself in a recurring role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and over the past decade has become a leading political voice in the US, too. Ten years ago this month, Sykes came out as a lesbian at a same-sex marriage rally in Nevada, one month after her own wedding to Alex Niedbalski.
Today, she holds nothing back. But after the election-week reaction to her Trump joke, Sykes took a break from performing. The tone of her act was tilting in the wrong direction. She realised, she says, that she was “just ranting. There’s not even a joke here.” She wasn’t afraid of the crowds. She was afraid of her own anger. “I had to step back and go: ‘How can I make this funny?’ You just have to find that spot and ultimately be able to be funny in the midst of all this shit that’s insane.”
She has seen people bridge apparently impossible divides before. Her parents were deeply religious and Sykes didn’t come out until her 40s; she has said her mother was devastated and asked her to stay closeted. When she did come out, her mother did not go to her wedding. But, over time, her parents have grown to embrace her wife and kids, thanks in part to the aunts and uncles who prodded them to choose love over intolerance. “They really embrace what it is to be a Christian,” says Sykes. “My father’s sister, who’s the oldest, she was like: ‘You know God loves you and God loves your family – don’t you let anybody tell you otherwise.’ It’s like, wow, OK, good. This is how it’s supposed to be.
“We have to have those conversations,” she adds. “The scary part for me right now is that we’re having them with each other instead of crossing over and talking to people who don’t feel the same way [as us]. They’re all talking about how awful we are and we’re all talking about how awful they are.”
Earlier this year, Sykes started consulting on the revival of the 80s sitcom Roseanne; she thought this could be a good place to begin talking across the political divide. A sitcom with two sisters – Roseanne the Trump supporter and Jackie the liberal – could give people an opening to communicate. The original ABC show had dealt frankly with working-class issues and, in the decades since, star Roseanne Barr had become a controversial political figure. She ran for president in 2012 on a Peace and Freedom party ticket (after losing the Green party nomination to Jill Stein), and began to support rightwing ideology. When Roseanne was rebooted, some critics feared the platform this would give to its star’s beliefs – among other things, she was given to tweeting about the rightwing conspiracy theories QAnon and Pizzagate. Yet the show debuted in March this year to massive ratings – which Trump took credit for – and was immediately renewed for a second series.
In mid-April, Sykes had the clairvoyance to tell a Boston newspaper that “Roseanne is just an old lady who shouldn’t be on Twitter. She believes everything she reads …” Six weeks later, Barr wrote a controversial and catastrophic tweet, comparing Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to a character from Planet of the Apes. When the tweet was posted, Sykes says she was sad, but not entirely surprised. That same day, she quit the show, publicly declaring her resignation on Twitter: “I will not be returning to @RoseanneOnABC.” Terse and precise. It took a few drafts. “At first I was like, ‘This tweet is racist, blah blah blah, I can’t condone …’” says Sykes, “and then I was like, you know what, just saying that you’re leaving says it all.” Ninety minutes later, the network announced it was cancelling the show.
Barr blamed Sykes’s departure for ending the series. “Her tweet made ABC very nervous and they cancelled the show,” wrote Barr on Twitter. Three weeks later, ABC revived the show a third time, now renamed The Conners, with cast members Sara Gilbert, Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman continuing without Barr and Sykes’s involvement.
Today, Sykes has empathy for Barr. There are, she says, “some mental issues – she’s said so herself – and I think for anyone with mental issues, social media is not the place you should be. She was tweeting something that I honestly didn’t know what it was. QAnon? What the hell is this? I was telling my producing partner: ‘We have to get her off social media, this is nuts.’”
“Very unfortunate,” says Sykes. Her exhausted exhale says it all. She and Barr haven’t spoken since, though, she adds: “I would love to.”
Her focus now is on discovering comedy’s future rather than making amends for its former stars. Beyond Roseanne, she has had a busy year, shooting films and her twice Emmy-nominated recurring guest role on the sitcom Black-ish. Her reality show Unprotected Sets has also been touring the US to promote bold new comics, the majority of whom are female and/or people of colour, including recent breakout performer Zainab Johnson, a Muslim woman who grew up with 12 siblings in Harlem.
“We’re putting a lot of fresh faces out there, giving them a platform,” says Sykes. And she is weighing up a new challenge: writing her first film script. In the past, she has got stuck editing and re-editing her first draft. But she has now realised that her first film doesn’t have to change Hollywood – it just has to shift its perspective. “If it was something personal from an African American lesbian, it’s not about the story,” says Sykes, nodding to herself. “It’s about who’s the storyteller.”
When Sykes isn’t sweating over jokes, suburban life with her wife is an oasis. She first spotted Niedbalski on a ferry to the New York gay resort Fire Island, instantly absorbing everything about her from the logo on her computer bag to the woman and baby she was talking to. “Something really said to me – like, audibly – ‘Wow, that’s what you need, Wanda,’” says Sykes. The next day, she was bemoaning her love life to a friend who ordered her to quit boring cute strangers with stories about remodeling her kitchen and instead start using cheesy pick-up lines.
In defiance, she told the very next person she met all about her kitchen – and that woman introduced Sykes to the beauty from the boat, a Frenchwoman who sold granite countertops, and was, to Sykes’s joy, single. A decade of marriage later, the two are now the parents of bilingual nine-year-old twins.
Her family is gearing up to visit their relatives in France over the Christmas holidays, where Sykes plans to feast on foie gras before performing a sneak peak of her upcoming Netflix standup special at the Union Chapel in London on 11 January. She is still perfecting her set, she says, and doesn’t want to reveal any of the jokes. “But I’m really happy with it.”
As a child, Sykes’s mouth always got her in trouble. Her mother was a banker, her father a former US army colonel, and both were petrified when their friends came to visit. “I would look at somebody and if they looked funny – if their wig was crooked, or if I’d heard my parents talk about who owed them money – I would just bring it up,” cackles Sykes. “I was like a little time bomb.” Eventually, whenever company came calling, her parents quarantined her at her grandmother’s house to keep the peace.
Not long after, the rambunctious tomboy became aware of more necessary targets for her sharp wit. In the fourth grade, she was forbidden to play football at her white friend’s suburban home. “His mother came outside and was like: ‘Hey Billy, you know the rules. There’s no niggers allowed in our yard,’” says Sykes. Her playmates offered to switch to another kid’s house, but Sykes, naturally, remained upset. “I didn’t want to play at Jeff’s because his yard was always full of dog shit,” she says, “so I was like: ‘Aw, man, this just sucks all around.’”
Sykes didn’t know then that she was descended from a line of iconoclasts. The genealogy TV show Finding Your Roots only recently discovered that her ninth great-grandmother was a white woman who received 39 lashes for having a child with a slave in 1683, just 40 miles from where Sykes was born in Virginia. As a result, one branch of her family tree has always been black and free, going back nearly two centuries, to before the American civil war. “We weren’t even one year a slave!” quipped Sykes when she learned her lineage. Her ancestors’ story isn’t just unusual – it’s practically unheard of.
“My dad, he was so proud. And my uncle’s like: ‘Yeah, we knew there was something special!’” says Sykes. Still, she adds, the revelation was “bittersweet, because OK, wow, I was able to trace one of my grandparents – but the other three [had ancestors who] were just property, so there was no record.
“Just through personal experience – racism, discrimination – you know what’s not right and you just become more aware of how things really are,” she says. Gradually, as she grew up, she became more liberal than her parents, although she continued to follow their sensible path, earning a marketing degree from Hampton University, before spending five years as a contracting specialist for the National Security Administration, where she calculated the best bids for blueprints and schematics. “I didn’t even know what I was buying,” she says now. She was restless. Was this really the best use of her brain? Hadn’t her high-school classmates always told her she was hilarious?
The first time Sykes’s parents saw her perform at an open mic – her third performance, ever – the audience booed. “It’s OK,” her mother said afterwards, in consolation. “You have a good government job.” They couldn’t believe that the daughter they had attempted to raise with their conservative values would throw away a good salary to become a standup comic.
But Sykes charged forward. She had made audiences laugh once; she could do it again. “I remember how great it felt when it went well,” she says. “I can’t imagine bombing the first time and staying with it.” For the next five years, she would duck out of her desk job to perform anywhere she could, working her way up from free gigs to paid out-of-town shows that gave her the confidence to quit her day job. “Leaving security, health benefits and a good job to stand in a club and try to make a bunch of drunks laugh. That’s nuts!”
Recently, she re-told her election-week Trump joke in New Jersey – and got booed again. “With politics, a lot of it is pointing out hypocrisy, speaking truth to power,” she says. But she is undaunted. “The midterms did give me some hope.” Sure, some people might still hiss at what she has to say. Yet the last election was proof they are in the minority. “What you would like to see is those who are way over on the right beginning to open their minds. But at least there are enough of us that they’re just going to have to come along.”
Wanda Sykes is at Union Chapel, London, on 11 January. Tickets available at LiveNation.co.uk.
