Wanda Sykes Wants It All

By Joel Stein/Pahrump

Sassy Wanda Sykes is Sassing her way to a career of sassifying. See, Sykes hates that word, and she's at her funniest when she's angry. "Sassy to me is a put-down. It's given to black women. No one calls Ellen DeGeneres sassy. No one calls Robin Williams sassy. And that's a sassy man," she says. "Sassy is all attitude and no content. And I've got something to say."

So much that Sykes feels the need to say it everywhere: a new sitcom on Comedy Central, Wanda Does It; a book, Yeah, I Said It; a 31-city comedy big-venue stand-up tour, The Cotton T-Shirt Tour; a big role in this summer's Monster-in-Law with Jennifer Lopez and Jane Fonda; a gig as a prank-calling puppet on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers; and a recurring role on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Also, she fixed up her website real nice.

Sykes worked for the National Security Agency and started doing stand-up after entering a Washington talent contest in 1987. She quit her job five years later to move to New York City, where she met Chris Rock, who hired her as a writer for his HBO show. She got her performing break when fellow writer (and star, as a nonsense-spewing rapper, of the movie Pootie Tang) Lance Crouther agreed to take her to a work party for HBO's Inside the NFL, even though he wasn't supposed to take a guest. Sykes, who was told to lie low, spent the entire time loudly mocking show host Bob Costas' inability to admit he doesn't know something. To Bob Costas. He was so amused that he gave her an on-air job on Inside the NFL.

It's this fearlessness mixed with constant outrage--imagine Larry David with an actual reason to be angry--that gives Sykes' voice its distinct character. In Yeah, I Said It, she writes of the no-win situation faced by less-than-good-looking women: "An ugly woman could cure cancer and there would be jokes on late-night television shows: 'Did you hear about the ugly scientist that cured cancer? Yeah, that's great. You know how she found the cure? Apparently she looked at the cancer and scared it away.'"

Her righteous indignation has propelled her to No. 14 on ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY's list of the funniest people in America, and she seems determined to make it into the Top 10 by every medium necessary.

Overexposure, however, requires being everywhere, and everywhere includes a whorehouse. For Wanda Does It, a sitcom disguised as a reality show in which the dialogue is improvised from an outline, Sykes tries out a different job every episode, apparently unhappy with the 50 she already holds. And since Sykes is extremely curious about what society deems unacceptable and in particular how to use those things to get herself more attention, she flew to the Chicken Ranch, the legal brothel in Pahrump, Nev., that was the basis for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (whorehouses, unsurprisingly, sometimes have to flee the state). In the episode, which aired last week, Sykes was trained by Diamond, a young hooker with a heart of gold. Probably. The heart stuff doesn't come up much around Sykes.

What does come up is a problem with the set. When the comforter in her room is pulled back, it is immediately apparent that the sheets have not been washed. The crew gathers around, riddling the bed's backstory like an episode of CSI: Pahrump. Though the Chicken Ranch management is horribly embarrassed by the lack of hygiene, Sykes, dressed in a velvet flapper outfit in the 100DEG heat, takes the situation in stride. Diamond, who changes the sheets, is also unfazed.

Everything is used for the show, including the fact that a reporter is on set. Playing Sykes' manager, Tim Beagley complains about the unseemliness of Wanda's behavior in front of a TIME reporter. For a scene shot back in Los Angeles, an actor is hired to play me. An actor who is slightly less handsome than I find realistic.

Sykes is trying to create a new kind of sitcom because, after her middling Fox show, Wanda at Large, was canceled last year, she no longer believes a writers' room can create an entertaining show. Reality, she believes, has made people realize how wooden sitcoms feel. "Now, when you have a laugh track, you say, What were they laughing at? It wasn't that funny," she says. The Comedy Central show forgoes a laugh track. "The people at home will do it for us. If you open your window, you will hear everyone laugh. It will be like Network. They might be watching Chappelle's Show, but still, listen to the laughter."

Sykes and writing partner Crouther have lifted such reality-show tropes as participants commenting to the camera about what is to transpire in the next scene to juice the comedy. In one episode, Sykes' manager tells the camera that Wanda often comes up with crazy ideas that wind up hurting her; we then cut to Wanda deciding to fix her drinking-and-driving problem by getting rid of her car.

Crouther says he realized Sykes' performing talents were greater than his (though, seriously, he was Pootie Tang) when they worked together as writers on Rock's show. "The first acting Wanda did was when she laid down on the street and pretended she got hit by a bus," he says. "It was like a shot to the brain. She was a great writer, and then she started performing."

Sykes' hooker performance is so strong (she could undoubtedly have turned a trick) that the Chicken Ranch manager asks Sykes if she can put her picture on its website. Since this is another form of promotion, Sykes briefly considers it in the limo ride back to the Mandalay Bay. Finally, she sighs and says, "I can't run for office with my picture on the Chicken Ranch website." The woman really is planning to do every job in the country.