{"id":3367,"date":"2026-06-11T22:28:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T22:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/06\/11\/awards-chatter-pod-wanda-sykes-on-her-netflix-stand-up-special-legacy-emceeing-the-oscars-the-night-of-the-slap-and-never-having-hosted\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T22:28:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T22:28:00","slug":"awards-chatter-pod-wanda-sykes-on-her-netflix-stand-up-special-legacy-emceeing-the-oscars-the-night-of-the-slap-and-never-having-hosted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/06\/11\/awards-chatter-pod-wanda-sykes-on-her-netflix-stand-up-special-legacy-emceeing-the-oscars-the-night-of-the-slap-and-never-having-hosted\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Awards Chatter\u2019 Pod: Wanda Sykes on Her Netflix Stand-Up Special \u2018Legacy,\u2019 Emceeing the Oscars the Night of \u2018The Slap\u2019 and Never Having Hosted \u2018SNL\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tWanda Sykes<\/a>, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>\u2019s Awards Chatter<\/em> podcast, is a trailblazing stand-up comedian, actress and writer who has to her name 17 Emmy nominations and one win; was picked by Entertainment Weekly<\/em> as one of the 25 funniest people in America and Comedy Central as one the 100 greatest stand-ups of all-time;\u00a0and is now, for her seventh hourlong stand-up special, Netflix\u2019s Wanda Sykes: Legacy<\/a><\/em>, back in Emmys contention.<\/p>\n

\tOver the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>, the 62-year-old opened up about what prompted her, at the age of 27, to leave a steady job with benefits at the National Security Agency to pursue a career as a stand-up; how her comedy changed after she divorced her husband in 1998 en route to coming out as a lesbian in 2008; and some of the hot-button comedy issues of recent years, many of which she has had a front-row seat to: the firing of Roseanne Barr during the making of the reboot of the TV series Roseanne<\/em>, which she was a part of; the slapping of her friend and mentor Chris Rock by Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars ceremony that she co-hosted; and the targeting by President Trump of comedians including Jimmy Kimmel, on whose late-night show she was set to appear as a guest the night Kimmel got pulled off the air in 2025. \t<\/p>\n

\tYou can listen to the full conversation via the audio player above or read excerpts of it \u2014 lightly edited for clarity and\/or brevity \u2014 below.<\/p>\n

\tOn chaperoning a teenage Dave Chappelle on the D.C. comedy circuit in the late \u201980s\/early \u201990s\u2026<\/em><\/strong> \t<\/p>\n

\t\u201cDave, when his mother couldn\u2019t make it out to the club, he would ask me, he\u2019d say, \u2018Hey, can you just sign for me and just say you\u2019re my aunt?\u2019 And I\u2019m alike, \u2018All right.\u2019 He was too young to be in the club without an adult, so I would give him rides. And he would mess with my radio, and that\u2019s when I was like, \u2018Look. Okay, wait a minute now. You\u2019re taking it too far.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\tOn the significance of 2009\u2019s <\/em>Wanda Sykes: I\u2019ma Be Me, her first stand-up special after coming out as gay\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u201cThe handcuffs were off. It was the first time doing an hour when I could really just say whatever I want to say and just be open.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tOn Trump going after late night comedians\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u201cThis isn\u2019t cancel culture. This is fascism. You get canceled when people don\u2019t want to hear from you anymore \u2014you can\u2019t get booked or people don\u2019t want to buy tickets, that\u2019s being canceled. This is the government trying to shut us down and trying to end freedom of speech. That\u2019s two different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tOn hosting the Oscars in 2022, the night Smith slapped her friend and mentor Rock, and she tried to get Diddy to say something about it\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u201cWe had just finished our bit \u2014 we\u2019d had a bit in the audience \u2014\u00a0so we were going backstage, and I went back to my trailer and was going to get changed, and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, shoot, it\u2019s Chris [presenting next],\u2019 so I said, \u2018I want to be able to hear the audience.\u2019 So I run back to the back of the stage, and I walk in, I look at the monitor, and I see Will on stage, and I\u2019m like, \u2018Did he just slap him?\u2019 It\u2019s quiet and we\u2019re all just like, \u2018This must be a bit.\u2019 And then when Will got back to his seat and was screaming and everything, Chris was trying to keep his composure and he was like, \u2018Wow, OK now\u2019\u2026 I\u2019m looking at the stage manager and I\u2019m like, \u2018Do I need to go out? Can I go out? Should I go out?\u2019 And he was like, \u2018No, just wait. We\u2019re talking to the booth. Wait.\u2019 Sean Combs was the next person to go up \u2014 Chris presented to Questlove, and then the next presenter was Sean \u2014\u00a0so I\u2019m there like, \u2018Sean, you got to say something about this, man. You got to say something about this. This isn\u2019t right. This isn\u2019t right.\u2019 And he goes, \u2018I got you, Wanda.\u201d And then he\u2019s like [from the stage], \u2018Hey, we\u2019ll work this out at the Beyonce party.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Well, that\u2019s not what I was thinking.\u2019 But I was really upset and just disgusted that this industry just let somebody sit out there and then win\u2026 [If Smith had been ejected from the theater and then awarded the best actor Oscar,] I was going to do the, \u2018Unfortunately, Will couldn\u2019t be here tonight.\u2019\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tOn wanting to host <\/em>Saturday Night Live, which she has never been asked to do<\/em>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u201cSomething hit me the other day. I said, \u2018You know what? I think I would like to do that: let\u2019s host SNL<\/em>.\u2019 I like sketch, and it\u2019s still a big show, and, especially with the way late night is going down, that\u2019s just an incredible platform.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wanda Sykes, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s Awards Chatter podcast, is a trailblazing stand-up comedian, actress and writer who has to her name 17 Emmy nominations and one win; was picked by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 25 funniest people in America and Comedy Central as one the 100 greatest stand-ups of all-time;\u00a0and is now, for her seventh hourlong stand-up special, Netflix\u2019s Wanda Sykes: Legacy, back in Emmys contention. Over the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter, the 62-year-old opened up about what prompted her, at the age of 27, to leave a steady job with benefits at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[326,2,85,86,1950,1951],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awards-chatter-podcast","category-hollywood","category-tv","category-tv-news","category-wanda-sykes","category-wanda-sykes-legacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}