Wanda Sykes on Her New Netflix Special, Dave Chappelle and Being a ‘Woke Comic’: ‘They Say That Like It’s an Insult’
Wanda Sykes began working on “I’m an Entertainer,” her latest Netflix stand-up special, in 2019, hardly any of the material she wrote prior to March 2020 made it into the show. Instead, it was the radioactive events of the pandemic era — from COVID vaccinations to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the battle over trans rights to the murders of Black Americans like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain — that Sykes was drawn to. Those deaths and the racial reckoning that followed were not obvious fodder for making people laugh. “All that stuff just kept piling on,” Sykes says, her voice softer and more tentative than the tart Southern twang she deploys on stage. “I knew I wanted to talk about it, but I just didn’t know how to make it funny. We were all just so angry.”