Wanda Sykes Wants It All

Sassy Wanda Sykes is Sassing her way to a career of sassifying. See, Sykes hates that word, and she's at her funniest when she's angry. "Sassy to me is a put-down. It's given to black women. No one calls Ellen DeGeneres sassy. No one calls Robin Williams sassy. And that's a sassy man," she says. "Sassy is all attitude and no content. And I've got something to say."

So much that Sykes feels the need to say it everywhere: a new sitcom on Comedy Central, Wanda Does It; a book, Yeah, I Said It; a 31-city comedy big-venue stand-up tour, The Cotton T-Shirt Tour; a big role in this summer's Monster-in-Law with Jennifer Lopez and Jane Fonda; a gig as a prank-calling puppet on Comedy Central's Crank Yankers; and a recurring role on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Also, she fixed up her website real nice.

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Sykes worked for the National Security Agency and started doing stand-up after entering a Washington talent contest in 1987. She quit her job five years later to move to New York City, where she met Chris Rock, who hired her as a writer for his HBO show. She got her performing break when fellow writer (and star, as a nonsense-spewing rapper, of the movie Pootie Tang) Lance Crouther agreed to take her to a work party for HBO's Inside the NFL, even though he wasn't supposed to take a guest. Sykes, who was told to lie low, spent the entire time loudly mocking show host Bob Costas' inability to admit he doesn't know something. To Bob Costas. He was so amused that he gave her an on-air job on Inside the NFL.

It's this fearlessness mixed with constant outrage — imagine Larry David with an actual reason to be angry — that gives Sykes' voice its distinct character. In Yeah, I Said It, she writes of the no-win situation faced by less-than-good-looking women: "An ugly woman could cure cancer and there would be jokes on late-night television shows: 'Did you hear about the ugly scientist that cured cancer? Yeah, that's great. You know how she found the cure? Apparently she looked at the cancer and scared it away.'"

Her righteous indignation has propelled her to No. 14 on ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY's list of the funniest people in America, and she seems determined to make it into the Top 10 by every medium necessary.

Overexposure, however, requires being everywhere, and everywhere includes a whorehouse. For Wanda Does It, a sitcom disguised as a reality show in which the dialogue is improvised from an outline, Sykes tries out a different job every episode, apparently unhappy with the 50 she already holds. And since Sykes is extremely curious about what society deems unacceptable and in particular how to use those things to get herself more attention, she flew to the Chicken Ranch, the legal brothel in Pahrump, Nev., that was the basis for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (whorehouses, unsurprisingly, sometimes have to flee the state). In the episode, which aired last week, Sykes was trained by Diamond, a young hooker with a heart of gold. Probably. The heart stuff doesn't come up much around Sykes.

What does come up is a problem with the set. When the comforter in her room is pulled back, it is immediately apparent that the sheets have not been washed. The crew gathers around, riddling the bed's backstory like an episode of CSI: Pahrump. Though the Chicken Ranch management is horribly embarrassed by the lack of hygiene, Sykes, dressed in a velvet flapper outfit in the 100° heat, takes the situation in stride. Diamond, who changes the sheets, is also unfazed.