COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Wander over to Fox for a wild ride with Wanda
I loved Wanda Sykes the first time I saw her. Nothing has changed since. She was on Jay Leno’s old “Tonight Show.” What I caught were the last three minutes of wondrous Sykes in a sit-down interview when David Letterman had gotten tedious and, as was my occasional wont, I surfed over to “Tonight” to see what was going on.
And what was going on was Sykes. Who is THAT?, I wondered—with that nasal, mock-childish delivery, Kewpie doll smile and wild, mischievous sense of humor? She reminded me a little of one of my all-time favorite people, a much-adored cousin who died appallingly young of lupus but who, in our childhoods, had almost the same wicked smile, hilariously nasal line delivery and gleefully subversive laugh. She was, throughout her horrifically short life, a one-woman conspiracy against pomp and unnecessary propriety.
No adult was safe around my cousin. As long as her tongue could wag and her lungs explode in a deflating laugh, she would say something festively inappropriate and spot-on. She could turn just about any occasion into a minor rebellion a deux or trois. (More than two listeners, sadly, vitiated her impact a bit.)
And there, ever-so-sly, was the grown-up stand-up (or should I say, sit-down) version of my cousin— differently complected, of course, and with a large audience and an accent far from Cattaraugus County but that same nasal sound and infectiously subversive attitude.
What I’d somehow missed was almost all of early Sykes— her bits on Chris Rock’s HBO show and, especially, a fabled 2001 summer replacement series produced by Steve Martin called “Downer Channel.” I’m told by a friend that Sykes’ impression of Halle Berry on the show was immortal.
Sadly, I missed it entirely.
I’d catch Sykes on the fly here and there—on Leno and other shows. And always want more. Much more. But when I had to review the movie that actually brought a retired Jane Fonda and then-high-riding Jennifer Lopez together—a piece of up-from-dinner-theater junk called “Monster-in-Law” —there was Wanda Sykes playing Fonda’s personal assistant.
The whole set-up couldn’t have been cornier or more old-fashioned— the smart-cracking black assistant with the crazy and egomaniacal white boss. How on earth did a comic as hip as Wanda Sykes get trapped in such a crummy, third-rate ’40s radio set-up?
Well. It worked. That’s how. And worked wildly well, too—so much so that after a mere five minutes of movie, you wanted everyone else on screen to take a hike for the duration and just leave Fonda and Sykes alone to knock lines back and forth for 90 minutes. The Fonda/Sykes show could have been a minor movie classic worth Fonda, in her senior years, getting out of bed, putting on war paint and fancy duds.
Talk about stealing a movie from heavyweights.
There was also a Fox sitcom that didn’t take.
But Julia Louis-Dreyfus clearly saw “Monster-in-Law.” The best thing, by far, about her show “The New Adventures of Old Christine” is that it gave regular employment to Wanda Sykes. Not optimally, mind you, but any Wanda is better than no Wanda at all.
Somewhere in all of that, Sykes came out publicly and matter-of-factly as a lesbian, which only gave her that much more edge.
Which brings us, first, to her recent HBO special “I’ma Be Me” (which began in October and runs on various HBO networks and time slots throughout November). Finally, for the world to see, we had the pure unadulterated Sykes in full goose stand-up and she was, predictably, hilarious. Delightful.
She talked openly about her wife and new twins and weight. But the whole show ended with a cluster of Viagra jokes so good that there is probably a massive platoon of male comics privately seething at how bad theirs are in comparison.
And now, at long last, Wondrous Wanda gets a whole late night show to call her own. On Nov. 7 (see this Sunday’s TV Topics), the Fox network is putting Wanda Sykes in the slot where “Madtv” finally sank and Spike Feresten couldn’t swim.
Sykes is going to have her own “Saturday Night” talk show to do battle against “Saturday Night Live.”
I’m there. And not only because I’ve found “Saturday Night Live” so easy to skip for years. It’s the very idea of a talk show starring Wanda Sykes that fires up the imagination. What on earth is that going to be?
At some point, by the way, some Vanity Fair writer (James Wolcott, perhaps) or well-placed academic ought to weigh in with an intelligent discussion of the solid lesbian prominence among major talk show hosts (Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, now Wanda Sykes). It may mean a lot. Then again, it may mean next to nothing. I’d like someone good at it to think about though. It seems interesting, at the very least.
All I know is, sight unseen, Wanda Sykes is the best late night Saturday news since Tina Fey discovered Sarah Palin.
Or was it vice versa? I forget.
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