About halfway through her new Netflix special, Wanda Sykes squats down and mimes pulling a tampon out from between her legs. To the noisy delight of her sold-out live audience, she swings the imaginary sanitary product round her head like a lasso. It’s not just an anarchic attempt to sum up the kind of bad behaviour that goes on in public toilets – it’s also a takedown of transphobic moral panic. After all, these spaces that people are freaking out about admitting trans women to – they’re not exactly the most pleasant places in the world. “I welcome my trans sisters into the ladies’ room,” she shrugs to the crowd. “Maybe you’ll make us do better, y’know?”
At 59, and with 30 years’ standup experience behind her, Wanda Sykes can segue from the personal to the political, and back again, in a hot flash. Her latest special, I’m an Entertainer, has material on her family life, how medical sexism has let down menopausal women and why Black people can’t be “weird” for fear of being murdered in the street – (“We have to fit the stereotype … [but] white people do weird shit all the time. Renaissance fairs – what the fuck is that?”) – which she switches between with the effortless groove of a Soul Train line dancer. Is she ever not enjoying herself? “In the early stages, when I’m trying new stuff, I’m anxious to see what it’s gonna do,” she muses from her Pennsylvania home. “But once it’s all there … Man. That’s when it’s fun.”
