Wanda Sykes: I'm an Entertainer

Ladies and gentlemen,

put your hands together for Wanda Sykes.

Philadelphia, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

Oh my God, I'm so excited to be here, Philadelphia,

you know, shoot my special.

You know, my last special was in 2019.

It was called Not Normal.

Yeah.

Since then, we've had a pandemic,

an insurrection,

Roe v. Wade got overturned…

- Yeah. -

Yeah, I should have called that special The Good Old Days.

Shit.

What the fuck, y'all?

Monkeypox, lanternflies,

flooding in California, Texas frozen over…

Kanye's Black ass wearing a "White Lives Matter" T-shirt…

I think I'm gonna call this special, Here Comes Jesus.

We lived through a pandemic, y'all. What the fuck?

And COVID was scary,

'cause you didn't know what it was gonna do until you got it, right?

And I finally got it. It took two years, and I finally got it. Yeah.

You know, but I'm… I'm vaxxed, I'm fully vaccinated,

so, you know, the first two days were a little rough.

I'm isolating in the guest bedroom,

you know, so my wife couldn't bother me,

my kids couldn't bother me.

So on that third day, I was like, "Shit."

"How can I get some of that long COVID?"

"This agrees with me."

"This feels like me time."

Shit, I've been there just napping, you know, watching whatever I want.

You know, my wife, she would leave my meals at the door.

You know, she was like, "Babe, uh, why is there a towel underneath the door?"

You know, 'cause I'm in there smoking weed, you know, I'm…

"'Cause you don't want this shit!"

"I'm looking out for y'all!"

Then a couple of days later, she got it. Yeah.

Yeah, she, she tells me, "Babe, uh, I just tested positive."

"So, you know, I can, uh… I can isolate with you."

I was like, "Uh-uh."

"Yours is fresh. I'm on my way out."

"You hot."

And she's like, "That's not how it works."

I said, "You don't know. You ain't Sanjay Gupta."

"Take your ass back to our bedroom."

And then my son caught it. Yeah.

And his twin sister, she didn't get it.

Why? 'Cause she's a 13-year-old girl and she don't want shit to do with us.

You should see her little ass,

walking, like, 50 feet ahead of us,

acting like she's Beyoncé and we Destiny's Child.

But you know what, there's some things that I miss about being in the lockdown.

I do.

Remember we weren't letting anybody in your house, remember that?

You didn't let nobody in your house. Uh-uh.

And I miss that,

'cause it was fun telling my white friends to go around back.

I loved that.

"Uh-uh, Carol, go around back now."

"You know better than to come up here like that."

"You go on around back now. Git! Go on."

"I'll meet you by the fire pit. Go ahead, now."

A lot of drinking by the fire pit.

And there was some good stuff from the pandemic, right?

We got online church.

Oh, I love online church! Isn't that the best?

But somehow I'm still late. I don't know how that happens.

You just gotta log on, Wanda. Jeez!

Love online church.

Although Communion Sunday started to get out of hand.

Yeah, yeah, you know, the pastor would say, you know,

"Get your little wine, or your juice."

I was like, "Uh, you said wine. Say less."

So I would sit there with my little shot glass of wine

an, and my Ritz cracker, you know.

Yeah, 'cause the body of Christ is brown for me.

Yeah, I… I, I don't do Malibu Jesus, that blond-haired, blue-eyed guy. Uh-uh.

No.

That's just perpetuating white supremacy, that's all that's doing.

Have you seen one of the early drawings of Jesus?

He looks just like Teddy Pendergrass.

That's my Jesus.

I don't do Jesus of Nebraska. No, thank you.

So those first couple of, you know, COVID communions, I was good,

but by that sixth month,

boy, I was sitting there with a whole glass of a Cabernet…

…and an everything bagel.

I was like, "What the hell, Wanda? What are you doing?"

"This is ridiculous."

You know, by the end of the service, a cheese plate went into the situation.

I got a wine ring on my Bible. I was like, "Okay…"

"I gotta get back in the building. I need supervision."

You know, I… I got a friend who still hasn't been vaccinated.

No, she won't get vaccinated.

And she's laughing at me. She's like, "Uh, look at you."

"You don't know what's in that mess."

"You just put that mess in your arm. You don't know what's in it."

I was like, "Yeah, I don't know."

"And if they told me what was in it, I still wouldn't know what was in it."

"I'm not a scientist, jackass."

But they laugh at me. They laugh at me.

They talk like, "Well, I just don't put anything in my body."

I'm like, "You use Splenda. Shut the fuck up."

But you know, I wasn't afraid of the vaccine

because I grew up with something called, uh, the mosquito man.

Yeah. I grew up in Virginia, you know,

rural area, and, uh, you know, we had the mosquito man.

Like, the mosquito man comes around now,

but they, you know, they call your house and leave a recording,

and say they're gonna come and, you know, treat the area,

and to stay inside and bring your pets inside.

Yeah. Not back then. Mm-mm.

Back in the late '60s, they, they would just pop up.

Yeah, and we lived back in the woods, you know,

no, no streetlights, just dirt roads.

You know, my grandmother didn't have indoor plumbing.

So when the mosquito man came around,

that was an exciting time for us.

That was like the circus.

You know what I'm saying? It's like, other neighborhoods they would get…

Mm-mm. Not us. We would get…

And we would lose our fucking minds.

The kids, man, we would drop whatever we was doing…

"It's mosquito man!"

"Yeah, it's the mosquito man!"

And we would run to the end of the road to greet the mosquito man

just to get behind his truck to play in that fog of pesticide.

"You can't see me!"

We would play tag, just having the time of our lives.

And the mosquito man was an asshole, right?

Because instead of saying, "Kids, get out of here!"

"Go inside. This is poison!"

He would shoot at us like it was a video game.

That asshole would slow down and crank it up more

so we'd get a bigger fog.

And we're just loving it.

Just running in it, mouth wide open.

And then when he was leaving the neighborhood, we would thank him.

"Thank you, mosquito man! Thank you!"

"Come back soon, okay?"

And then we'd walk back home,

with that pesticide just steaming off of us.

Flies would land on us

and then just die.

So, I wasn't scared of no vaccine.

So I'm married, happily married.

Married a French woman. Yeah, she's French.

And she, she's white, she's white, and, uh…

And we have twins, Lucas and Olivia. They're 13 now.

They're white too. Yeah, you know.

I figured if she was gonna carry them, they should look like her, you know?

And also I felt like, you know, "Hey,

if shit didn't work out, it would be easier for me to walk away."

"It's like I was never there."

She's not gonna like that joke.

And she's really not gonna like that I put in my will

that in order for the kids to get the money,

they gotta legally change their names

to Rashad and Laquisha.

The kids are now in public school, yeah.

Because, uh, since pre-K, they were going to the French School,

because my wife was like,

"Okay, so I'm the mother, and, uh, you know,

the kids, they have to learn French first,

'cause it's the tongue of the mother."

"So, uh, they have to go to the private French school, okay?"

And I was like, "Yeah, that's cool. You know, French first, okay."

My friends were like, "What you mean, 'French first'?"

I was like, "Would you shut the hell up? I know what I'm doing."

Anyways, I felt like the kids would bring me some homework and I'd just go…

"Go ask the other one."