“Kevin called me before it was announced, and I said, No,” says Sykes on the pod. “He said, ‘Come on Wanda! It’d be good! It’d be good for your special, you’ve got a special coming out.’ I was like Kevin, you know I love you man… But he goes ‘I know, I know it’s not your thing. You would just come in, do your thing, and get outta there.’ But they were like, ‘No, you have to sit on the day,’ so I was like, Oh, hell no. Hell no. No way in the world.”
“I’ve consumed enough to go, Thank God I went to the Sparks game instead,” says Sykes of what the roast turned out to be, which was full of tired, racist material. “It’s just lazy, just lazy, lazy writing. But I thought the same thing with the [Tom] Brady roast, too. Seems like the roasts, they’re just… recycled sexist, racist, gay jokes. Like, come on.” Still, Sykes goes on to praise Chelsea Handler, Sheryl Underwood, and Na’im Lynn’s performances in the show.
Sykes addresses a few other hot-button comedy world issues during the interview. On Dave Chappelle, she maintains that she still loves him, though she doesn’t agree with all of his material. “He has the right to say whatever he wants to say, but I also have the right to tell him how I feel about it. But it’s out of love. The guy—he is so funny. He’s funny, he’s smart, I mean… I just know there’s so much more. There’s so much more there,” she says. She calls his 2016 SNL appearance, when he hosted the show after Donald Trump was elected the first time and asked people to give him a chance, a “pivotal moment.” (Chappelle has since disavowed that statement.) Sykes says, “I was like, uh-oh, I don’t like where this is going.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.