ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR
WANDA SYKES
I’ma Be Me, the title of Wanda Sykes’s latest HBO special, pretty effectively sums up the comedian and actress’s mantra for the past year. After years of whispers and speculation, the Washington, D.C. native felt she had no choice but to come out after California passed Proposition 8 in November. And so she did—in Las Vegas—imploring others to do the same. And then she hit the ground running to become a more visible face for our community, appearing at equality events all over the country, performing on Atlantis’s gay cruises, cohosting with Cyndi Lauper on this year’s True Colors tour—not to mention her boundary-breaking gig as emcee of Barack Obama’s first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where she famously called Rush Limbaugh “the 20th hijacker.”
“It’s great being out. Everything is out on the table and I am what I am,” she proclaimed in I’ma Be Me, in which a truly uncensored Sykes devotes equal time to race relations, bikini waxes, her own coming out, and sperm donors. A post–coming out Wanda, is funnier, freer, and more successful than ever. In addition to stealing scenes again this season on both The New Adventures of Old Christine on CBS and on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sykes landed her own nighttime talk show, The Wanda Sykes Show (which premiered on Fox in November), where she’ll be able to try out new material on her latest development: raising her and wife Alex’s twins, Lucas and Olivia, born last April.
