Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics

5. “White People Are Looking at You!”: Wanda Sykes’s Black Looks

155 “White People Are Looking at You!” wanda sykes’s bLaCk LOOks DANCING IN THE CAR In the Last MOnths Of 2009 wanda sykes was “eveRywhere ,” as one reporter put it: as a supporting character on The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006–2010), an occasional guest star on Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2011), a cartoon voice on Nickelodeon’s Back at the Barnyard (2007–2011), and a talk-show host beginning herown late-night gig on Fox, The Wanda Sykes Show (2009–2010), not to mention her status as “high on every talk show host’s lists of favorite guests” (Fienberg). In November her HBO stand-up comedy special I’ma Be Me received rave reviews and was released as a DVD in early 2010, capping a decade in which Sykes developed into a highly visible, mainstream comic star. Visibility is a major theme in Sykes’s comedy, not the coveted celebrity prominence of being everywhere but rather the everyday hypervisibility of African Americans among whites. Sykes’s recurring topics are the looks black people get, what black people look like to whites, and what the world looks like to a black woman. My argument in this book is that the female body and its looks become uproarious material for women comics who bridle against the loaded cultural expectations about feminine ideals. As we’ve seen, the racist underpinnings of those expectations fuel the comedy of Margaret Cho, whose failure to match the white, slim images on television nearly killed her before it inspired her passionate comedy celebrating alternative bodies. The comedy of Wanda Sykes is often likewise angry, evoking the racial stereotype of the angry black woman that in turn she excoriates with brilliant mimicry.The stereotype works in concert with the historical positioning of the black female bodyas the antithesis ofwhite c h a p t e r f I v e 156 P R E T T Y| F U N N Y femininity. As described earlier, femininity and prettiness in Western culture have been pictured and embodied as white, so for women comics of color the pretty/funny dynamic takes on a particularly bristly contour. Moreover, black female bodies are criminalized and pathologized as oversexed , so the black female body is seen not only as not pretty but as threatening . Sykes’s comedy targets these racist ways of looking as well as the black self-policing of the body that results from this surveillance. More than that, Sykes herself is offering her own look at the visual dynamics of race, echoing bell hooks’s thoughts on “black looks” and the “oppositional black gaze.” At one time in history, hooks points out, black people were punished for looking; the slave was not supposed to meet the eyeof the master; the black man was not supposed to look at whitewomen. Looking is powerful for blacks, hooks says, as a way to “both interrogate the With a confrontational comic style, Wanda Sykes often targets black hypervisibility in her work by lampooning the ways white people look at black bodies and offering her own oppositional look in return. Photo courtesy of Photofest. 157 ~ “White People Are Looking at You!” gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see.The ‘gaze’ has been and is a siteof resistance forcolonized black people globally” (116). Sykes’s comedy is important because it does the political work described by hooks, interrogating and naming what she sees and exposing the practices of everyday racism. A good example is Sykes’s extended riff at the beginning of I’ma Be Me on how stereotypes are internalized. She starts with her tongue-in-cheek declaration that because of the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first black president, black people can let their guard down about their public image. “We always gotta be so dignified,” Sykes says, “cause if we fuck up, we set everybody else back a couple years.” Sykes mischievously explains that with a black president who has banished the stereotypes, she can now do all the things she was too embarrassed to do before, like tap dancing, as she demonstrates with some exuberant onstage dance steps. Looking back on the ways stereotyped behavior was frowned upon within the black community, she remembers her mother forbidding herand her sisters from “dancing in the car,”moving their bodies to radio music as theydrove along. “My mother...