In the post-quarantine comedy scene, it’s become customary for standups to share their experiences from the pandemic’s first two claustrophobic years. But few can say they were in Wanda Sykes’s position: watching the police killings of Black men and women on television as the only Black member of her family, while the necessary household conversations about race waited to be broached. (Sykes’s wife, Alex, is white, as are their fourteen-year-old twins.) With the cranky pragmatism that’s defined her public image for more than three decades, Sykes riffs on political topics and shares stories from her recent past, as well as from her younger, closeted self, in her latest Netflix special, “I’m an Entertainer.” (The title comes from a joke about Sykes’s sleeping with men before coming out: “It never really did anything for me, but they seemed to enjoy it. And I guess that was enough for me, ’cause, you know, I’m an entertainer.”)
Sykes continues to think of herself as a comic first, but as an actor, she’s lent her signature side eye—and scratchy, sardonic voice—to countless TV programs for a generation. At age fifty-nine, she’s still amassing credits at a rapid clip. She had a recurring role as an absurdly unflappable talent manager in Max’s “The Other Two,” which recently wrapped up its series run; co-starred as Representative Shirley Chisholm in the Hulu series “History of the World, Part II”; manned the desk at “The Daily Show” for a week in February; and co-hosted the Oscars with Amy Schumer and Regina Hall in 2021, the Year of The Slap. But the writers’ strike has forced her to pause on such projects as “The Upshaws,” the Norman Lear-inspired Netflix multicam comedy that returned for its fourth season on August 17th. The Black family sitcom, which she co-created with Regina Y. Hicks and stars in alongside Mike Epps and Kim Fields, received two Emmy nominations this year, as did “I’m an Entertainer.” Perhaps the clearest evidence of Sykes’s versatility and workaholism is that she received yet another Emmy nod for her role in a very different project—the adult puppet show “Crank Yankers.”
Sporting a baggy “Purple Rain” T-shirt, Sykes spoke to me in June over Zoom from Philadelphia, where she lives when she’s not in Los Angeles. In a wide-ranging discussion, she talked about the foundational skills that young TV writers today have fewer opportunities to learn, why politics are central to her standup, how she made her time at “The Daily Show” her own, and her struggle to get her teen-age children to church. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Are you having a lot of work affected by the writers’ strike?
Yeah, pretty much everything. The only exception is my production company, Push It. We started out in the non-scripted space, so we’re still looking for projects and putting things together. But we aren’t taking things out to pitch, not yet.
I read that you had stoppages on “The Upshaws.”
Yeah, we had two more episodes left. We shut down right before we had those two left. They weren’t written.
Are there any specific demands or concerns from the W.G.A. that really speak to you?
Pretty much everything; I’m concerned about everything. It’s not even about asking for more; it’s maintaining what we have. They’re actually trying to take some things away as far as, like, requiring that a writer be on set and the number of writers in a room. It’s about the survival of what we do.
TV writers today are increasingly not being sent to set, where much of the production knowledge that writers need to know are imparted. Can you talk about what an inexperienced writer might learn from going to set which you fear will get lost?
The main thing is maintaining the integrity of the script. If you have a script and you’re on set and they find that something doesn’t work, maybe the actors improv or whatever and come up with some other lines. And, if the writer is there and says that’s fine, then it’s still a collaborative process—the writer is still involved. But, if there’s no writer and everybody’s just doing what they want to do, the writer’s, like, Wait a minute, that’s not what I wrote; this is no longer my script.
What’s more concerning is the size of the rooms. These smaller rooms with high-level writers, you don’t have a new writer in there to learn. And that’s really where all the groundwork is done, in those rooms, learning from people who’ve been doing it quite a while. That’s how you move up in this business.
You got your writing Emmy in 1999 as a fairly new writer, right?
Yeah, I was on “The Chris Rock Show.” I was doing standup and then I got this job, and I was surrounded by other people who started in standup but became proven writers and producers. That’s how I learned the business, from being around them.
One of the most memorable segments in your new special is your description of watching the deaths of Black people on TV during the pandemic, being the only Black person in your family of otherwise white people, and feeling too exhausted to have the difficult conversations. Why did you want to talk about that experience?
I wanted to talk about it because it’s what I went through during the pandemic, and it’s what I was feeling during that isolation. And I wanted to talk about George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, to remind people of where we were, because I want people to continue to talk about it.
Do you feel like people are forgetting?
Not just forgetting—we still haven’t dealt with it. It’s just progressing instead of people saying, Hey, what are the next steps? So it was important for me to bring that up again.
Do you feel like there’s a need on your part to tackle heavier topics when we live in such politically charged times?
It’s just what I’m interested in, you know? I would love to go out and do an hour just being silly. But, if I could, that means things are great in this country. [Laughs.] I just don’t have the freedom to do it. Because, if I do, I’m, like, Why am I just up here having a good time and not really talking about what’s important? It would feel like I’m wasting my platform. And it would be at the expense of people who really need my voice.
In your special, you talk about going to an online church during the pandemic. How did you know that the church that you ended up with was the right one for you and your family?
You have to feel welcome. I was going to a church out in L.A. And then it just got to a place where I was, like, I don’t think this is working for me. It was about the L.G.B.T.Q. issue in the church and the way they approached it—it didn’t make me feel comfortable. So I found another church, and I love this church that I’ve been going to online.
I’ve also been going to a church that’s local. And, to me, it’s all about what the church does outside of the building, too. The churches that I attend or watch online have a huge outreach program. There’s food banks, scholarships, a prison outreach. They’re visiting hospitals. They’re doing the things that you’re supposed to do as Christian people.
Is it important to you that your kids also go to church? Do they go to church?
They do not. And that’s the one thing I feel that I am not doing a great job at. I have a cousin who’s a good pastor, so I was going to talk to him about how to go about this. I mean, we pray as a family and say grace and all that. Alex is Catholic, but she doesn’t, like, go, I guess. I thought that she was gonna take care of all that because she was, like, “They’ve got to get baptized!” when they were infants—so I thought, O.K., she’s got this. And then I realized, Oh, no, she doesn’t have this.
Wanda Sykes Is Taking It All In
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