As JFL42 winds to a close, a few more headliners made their way to Toronto’s Sony Centre. On Friday night, the first such headliner was comedian and actor Wanda Sykes — though she calls comedy her day job and everything else “moonlighting.”
But before Sykes entered the stage to thunderous applause and multiple screams of “We love you!” the show opened with a set by Keith Robinson. He began by talking about how much Toronto seems to be building things. “Is that a patch of grass?” he said at one point. “Better build a condo!”
He then segued into a number of topics, from the ever-extending reach of political correctness to the alleged craziness of his son’s mother (she threatened to smother his turtles, though Robinson doesn’t have any). A spiel about how white and black women would commit a murder was pretty funny, but an earlier joke about a specific instance in which hitting a woman would be acceptable soured his set.
When it was Sykes’ turn, she also began with a joke about Toronto’s condo-mania, joking that she could see TVs in people’s houses while driving on the highway. She also talked about the pains of flying as a black woman — she explained that every time she’s standing in first-class lines, an airport employee will ask her if shes’s standing in the right line.
Sykes touched on a number of current events, from the tension in Ferguson to the current Islamic State crisis. She also said that she supports Barack Obama but said he’s acting like someone in a relationship who wants it to end. She made fun of his snapping selfies at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service and his more recent “latte salute.”
She then spoke a lot about her family — her wife Alex Niedbalski and her children Olivia and Lucas. She expressed mock dismay at the fact that she’s a “minority in her home” and how her children started to call her “Mommy boo.” While she clearly loves her wife (“she keeps the sparks going in our relationship”) she also poked fun at her for the things she says sometimes. Sykes is often the one who cleans up after her dogs, and when she asked Niedbalski to clean up after them while she was away, Niedbalski replied “But you have such an eye for those kind of things.”
She ended her set by making fun of herself and the fact that she turned 50 this year. When her wife took them on a surprise date in a hotel, Sykes said she was freaking out and felt like it was a kidnapping.
All in all it was Sykes’ frank style that made her set worthwhile for any comedy fan.
