Wanda Sykes review – tough anti-Trump tirade is a potent tonic
The first half hour of Wanda Sykes’ maiden London gig is the biggest-hitting anti-Trump tirade I’ve heard yet on a comedy stage. It’s not telling us anything we don’t know, it may not change a single mind, but boy, is it funny, as Sykes ratchets up her dismay at, and disdain for, everything the president says, does and is.
Maybe it’s funnier because she’s 54, an age when life holds fewer surprises. Because Sykes plays these routines – after the Bridget Christie fashion – as if she just can’t believe what she’s waking up to every morning. There’s a fine joke about Trump infecting all his cronies with criminality, another about what we can read into the toilet paper stuck to his shoe. One gag considers POTUS’s ageing effect on the American population (“he has cracked black!”); in another, Sykes imagines herself as Stormy Daniels, but paying rather than receiving hush money.
Characteristically, she doesn’t settle for one big laugh from that joke, but inflates it ad absurdum – in proportion to Trump’s absurdity – until she’s protesting her innocence in heaven. It adds up to a terrific first third of her show, which then diffuses into wider personal and cultural material, and feels more rambling the longer it goes on.
There are still big, distinctive laughs, as Sykes shares her mixed feelings about bringing up two white children, or addresses the unsexiness of sleep apnoea. In a routine on Los Angeles earthquakes, she mocks her unpreparedness then proposes herself, in a striking mock-heroic image, as the city’s battle-scarred saviour. Saving us from Trump won’t be so easy – but Sykes at least administers a potent tonic.