I'ma Be Me

The election of Barack Obama gave Wanda Sykes a specific kind of relief: she could finally stop acting so dignified. With a Black man in the Oval Office, she figures the pressure is off the rest of the community to be perfect representatives. That tension release sets the tone for a set built around major life shifts. She talks about publicly coming out as gay in the wake of Proposition 8, marrying a French woman, and suddenly finding herself living in a house full of white people. The contrast between her inherited identity and her chosen one yields the strongest material of the night, particularly a routine about how coming out as gay is fundamentally harder than being Black, mostly because nobody has to sit their parents down and break the news of their race.<br><br>Filmed at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., the 2009 HBO broadcast caught Sykes at a pivot point. She was 45, a new mother to twins, and about to launch her own late-night talk show on Fox. The performance earned two Emmy nominations and wide critical praise. She ties broad policy topics to highly specific personal grievances, peaking during a detour about being the only person wearing a shirt on an all-male gay cruise.