‘Wanda Sykes: Not Normal’: There’s Nothing Normal About Netflix’s First Stand-Up Special Led By A Black Female

Trump’s not normal.

Then again, neither is seeing Wanda Sykes, or any Black woman for that matter, performing stand-up on Netflix. (See, or don’t: Mo’Nique, Leslie Jones, Sommore, Loni Love, Sherri Shepherd, Aisha Tyler, Gina Yashere, Sasheer Zamata, Amanda Seales.) Yamaneika Saunders and Michelle Buteau both received short-order stand-up specials from the streaming giant, and Nicole Byers may host the beloved series Nailed It!, but Black women have had to seek other outlets before now to release their hour-long stand-up specials. Sykes, for example, took her previous special to Epix. You remember Epix, right? That was October 2016. A month before Donald J. Trump took the Electoral College and the White House, too.

And now Sykes has broken the racial/gender barrier on Netflix with Not Normal, doing so with an introductory announcement for the viewers: “If you voted for Trump…and you came to see me…” she pauses, the live audience filling the silence with roars of approval, “…you f—ed up again.”

Sykes only spends the first half-hour on Trump, to be fair, devoting the second half of Not Normal to race and gender relations in America, and then narrows in on her home life. Which, considering she lives with a white French woman and two white children (twins, aged 10), ain’t exactly normal, either.

Onscreen, Sykes has found a lengthy and lucrative career as the audience’s voice of reason — whether as the friendly foil in black-ish, The New Adventures of Christine and Curb Your Enthusiasm — or as herself speaking truth to society in series such as Wanda At Large, Wanda Does It, and her short-lived late-night talker, The Wanda Sykes Show.

At 55, she’s even more embracing of her physicality onstage.

She mocks Trump’s lack of self-awareness in even looking presidential by embodying the inflatable tube men that wobble in the wind outside of car dealerships. She mocks the Trump family’s apparent need for Secret Service details by acting out a mall cop on patrol on a Segway. At other points, she mocks herself in menopause by demonstrating how her stomach jiggles when she brushes her teeth, or acts out a more self-aware version of The Bachelor in which the man tapped his female suitors with his dick instead of handing out roses.

On the latter, Sykes notes it’s not merely bad television, but bad for society, as well. “The Bachelor cannot coexist with #TimesUp, #MeToo.”

And yet, America continues on as if this is the new normal.

Sykes doesn’t offer up a solution for us in the Trump era, but she does suggest we improve race relations by hiring a publicist for black Americans to promote how their lives can be just as normal as those of whites.

In the end, though, when Sykes is her own Last Comic Standing (she was responsible for the NBC reboot from 2014-2015), she turns her comedy lens back onto herself. She reveals her own vulnerability, not just with menopause but also with a potentially severe case of sleep apnea, all for laughs.

All of which may make her too crude or honest for some. But to anyone who asks: “Hey Wanda, would it kill you to be a little more ladylike?” she has a simple but effective reply: “Yes. It would.”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Wanda Sykes: Not Normal on Netflix