Getting To Where She’s At

You may not have seen her in many network shows recently, but that doesn’t mean Wanda Sykes doesn’t have a lot going on.

Her production company with Page Hurwitz, Push It Productions, has produced the NBC show Last Comic Standing, created Talk Show the Game Show with Guy Branum for TruTV and developed a comedy at ABC with actress-comic Zainab Johnson.

She’s got a supporting role in the action-comedy film Snatched with Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn. And she’s a parent to twins with her wife Alex Niedbalski. She’s also had a recurring role on ABC’s black-ish.

Sykes’s family life takes center stage in her latest comedy special for Epix, What Happened… Ms. Sykes? In it she jokes about being a black woman from Virginia who attended a historically black college and pledged a black sorority, but is married to a white woman from France with two white kids.

“Now I am a minority in my own home,” Sykes says. “I talk a lot of shit, but at the end of the day, I take care of white people.”

Sykes, who was part of the writing team that won an Emmy in 1999 for The Chris Rock Show, recently chatted with NPR TV critic Eric Deggans for emmy, about raising kids in an interracial marriage, staying funny in the age of Donald Trump and praying that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stays healthy.

I thought the question you asked at the beginning of your special was a good one: How the f—k did you get here? Both in your family life and as a performer?

It’s not like I’d mapped anything out. You know, most people set a goal and they have plans and milestones and stuff. But I never really had that. My goal was just to be a good comic — one of the best comics. Everything else kind of happened from that. So I say to myself now, “Maybe I should set a goal next year — say I want to write a movie.”

But maybe you shouldn’t mess with what’s working….

Right? Right!

You have a unique household: two mommies, one black and one white, and twins. It could come off like a Benetton ad. But the way you talk about it, you’re not pulling any punches.

I know the politically correct thing would be to say, “We’re just a family like any other family and I don’t see any difference and we have just this one culture,” but that’s not the truth.

I’m a black woman from Virginia. So I do look around and see all these white people at my house. And I notice things. When I’m cleaning the house and my kids are watching TV, my wife is reading a magazine and I’m cleaning? Sometimes I go, “No, I’m not going to be the only one cleaning up here.” [ Laughs ] I’m not black Hazel, you know.

I’m sure the kids are like, “What is Mommy talking about?”

They have no idea. My wife doesn’t even — she has no idea that it sometimes hits me as a racial thing. Some of it is [just my asking,] “Why am I the only one here doing the cleaning?” But some of it is a racial thing.

I have raised kids in an interracial marriage, and I always wondered: how much should I try to make sure that their cultural experiences are biracial as well? Do you think about that?

My kids, they know about Martin Luther King and they know that everyone is equal, but they’re only seven. And not even my wife knows the real history — because it’s not taught here.

Over the Christmas holiday we went to Berlin for a few days, and I was impressed with how they own up to the horrible things that happened [during World War II].

Their monuments and memorials aren’t tucked away in some building. They have these huge memorials in the park, for the gypsies and the Holocaust. It’s out in the open and you gotta pass by on your way to work. They’re taught, “We did some atrocious stuff and let’s not do it again.”

Here in America, the way we teach about racism and slavery, it’s like, “Slavery happened, there was segregation and then Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat. And we elected Barack Obama and now we’re good.” [ Laughs ]

As Americans, we have a hard time with stories from our history where we’re not heroes….

Exactly. So I want to go more into it and teach my kids the history, but it has to be done the right way. It can’t be whitewashed. My fear is, one day I say [to my kids], “Go clean your room” and they say, “No, you go clean my room.” But that’s just my crazy.

You filmed your stand-up special right before the election, and here we are now in the age of Donald Trump. You sounded a lot more hopeful on the special. Do you feel a little less hopeful now?

Honestly, after the election I was hurt. I thought I knew my neighbors.

Doesn’t it feel like America rejected you a little bit?

It does. And then, when I saw all the protests and how many people were outraged, that made me feel better. I don’t know what the hell happened, but now I know that there’s at least 3 million more people out there who think the way that I think.

Have you developed any material as a stand-up to speak to your range of emotions?

I’m working on it. We’ve had enough jokes on his hair and that he’s orange. Let’s get to the meat of the situation. When you start writing from an emotional place, you end up writing a speech. It’s all about the timing and [getting] a clear vision of what you really want to say. Peeling that onion to see what’s underneath.

It feels like all these issues we thought we had resolved — that racial and ethnic diversity is good and transgender people and gay people deserve equal rights — are back on the table for debate.

I just keep praying for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health. Keep her healthy — prop her up. But I look around…. There are same-sex couples in more ads now; there are interracial couples in ads. I think the majority of Americans, they’re cool with it. [Fights over] abortion and gay marriage, these are just distractions.

You hosted a late-night show in 2009 on Fox. Given all the interest in political humor and late-night TV now, do you wish you were back in that game?

I enjoyed doing my show, but the timing wasn’t great. I was still doing The New Adventures of Old Christine [on CBS], and I was trying to do too much. I was a regular on New Adventures, so I would go to rehearsal and then run across town to work on my talk show. And I was just a new mom. If I could figure out a new format, then maybe I would take another stab at it.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2017