Wanda Sykes introduced, during her stand-up act, a simple way of settling today’s marriage debate: If you don’t believe in same-sex marriage, then don’t marry somebody of the same sex. It’s not that she feels the need to set people straight or comment on current events. Sykes just happened to make her union with her fiancée official as the topic moved to the forefront of current affairs conversations. It’s part of her life, as are her adopted kids, a bounce-back from breast cancer and recent revelations that the roots of her family tree are the longest ever researched by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard.
All those elements thread their way into her material, with her genealogy as the latest fabric. “I talk about it a little bit. I now weave it into my act because it’s basically my life,” says Sykes in a May phone interview. “I now have a French wife and kids. I am now a minority in my own home, which is really weird—‘There’s only one of me in here! What the hell? How did all these white people get in my house?’”
While the independent spirit that flows through her can be traced back centuries (“I came from free Negroes, and my ninth-generation grandmother was a free white woman.”) her comedy DNA can only be speculated upon. “I know my parents and my uncles and aunts all like to laugh, so I’m pretty sure we come from a long line of people who are funny. Also, we have a lot of ministers in our family, too, so we’ve had our showmen, also.”
The jokes flew at home, and Sykes’ parents watched a lot of comedy on television. Sykes’ father was a colonel in the Army, but she says at home he had a great sense of humor. Of course, Sykes also possesses one of the most distinctive voices in entertainment. “It’s weird, because as a kid, my mother, she didn’t like my voice,” recalls Sykes. “She wanted me to change my voice. If I was out playing and she heard me laughing or playing with the other kids, she would go ‘Wanda, come on! Do something with your voice!’ I’d go ‘What’s wrong with my voice?’ She just didn’t like it, which is hilarious. It’s my voice. I can’t change my voice!”
Her voice and sense of humor gave her the confidence to step up on the stand-up stage and the confidence to leave a secure job and pursue comedy as a career. She tormented Larry David for years on television in Curb Your Enthusiasm and returns to film in the flesh this summer in the basketball comedy The Hot Flashes, but after success with The Barnyard, Over the Hedge and Ice Age, expect her to get a lot more work in animation. “I never thought, ‘Oh boy! People are going to want to hear my voice in movies!’ …It wasn’t until I started getting offers to do animation that I started to say, ‘Oh, this is pretty cool. This is a nice opportunity to do animation because I have a funny-sounding voice. That’s great!’”
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