April 10--"I've kept ya'll long enough," Wanda Sykes languidly remarked in her uniquely identifiable speech pattern towards the end of her 90-minute set at the Chicago Theatre Saturday night. "Let me wrap this up."
The writer/actress/comedian best known for "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "The New Adventures of Old Christine" and "Black-ish" then laid out an additional 10 or so minutes of material before closing out, circling around and touching back on different aspects of the three main topics she spent the majority of her stage time on: parenthood, aging and race.
And despite deploying a consistently slow delivery -- coupled with a number of long pauses -- the audience was happy to come along for the lengthy ride, with her measured pacing demonstrating her placid confidence in both the jokes and the connection she had with the crowd, rather than engendering a low-energy room.
Unfortunately, she didn't have much build-up from opener Kevin Lee, who delivered 25 minutes of hit-and-miss shtick, mostly centered around setting up magic tricks with punchlines as payoffs, though he did some impressive juggling and a good bit of crowd work. Still, he could stand to hone his act a bit. "Ya'll need to go to audience school," he complained at one point after a joke failed to provoke much laughter.
But perhaps that's the best kind of anticipation to generate love for a headliner; the crowd roared to life when Sykes took the stage.
Understandably so. There's something remarkably endearing about Sykes' stage and screen persona -- that of a long-suffering but consistently upbeat Sisyphus, pushing the rock of the world's troubles uphill with a tight smile and an occasional belly laugh -- that makes her endlessly watchable, even through patches of less-than-stellar jokes (of which there were a few Saturday night).
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Perhaps it's her willingness to delve into her own struggles rather than reveling in her triumphs.
For example, when discussing how lucky she feels to have a beautiful wife and two loving children (all white), she had barely finished hitting on the positives before faux-lamenting, "I'm now a minority in my own house."
But to hear Sykes tell it, she's used to being put upon. It's her optimistically puzzled reaction to the scenarios of her life that make laughing seem like the best option.
Some of the material here has been used before -- on the late night circuit, among other places -- but that's par for the course when watching most comedians at this level on tour. But the sense of preparation sometimes felt a bit too ingrained. In a live show in a city this size a few moments of local acknowledgement are expected (even if they're largely contrived or formulaic).
While Sykes did in passing mention the Chicago Trump rally that wasn't, she missed a great opportunity with a particularly timely take on the second amendment that subtly implied that those in the safest neighborhoods (and therefore likely least in need of protection) seem to be the ones most opposed to gun control measures. "Where you live should determine the type of gun you can own," her premise goes. In other parts of the country this may play out for a generic laugh, but a discussion like this has real potential for bitingly comic social commentary on a Chicago stage, especially during the deadliest year we've experienced since 1999.
A younger, riskier Sykes -- perhaps the one that got her start writing for "The Chris Rock Show" -- might have gone there with it, not just bringing this set-up to our doorstep but kicking it into the foyer (as both John Oliver and Cameron Esposito did in Chicago sets in December).
The Wanda Sykes of 2016 is more focused on GMOs, Disneyland and her home life. And she's got good jokes for those aspects of her maturing personal world. But if you're going to talk about gun control in Chicago, there should be some talk about gun control in Chicago.
None of this is to say that Sykes has lost her edge -- her frank discussions about courting her wife and raising her children are penetrating and candid, even in a world where Louis CK has brought these topics into the comedy mainstream. "I wanna say it but can't," she says about her decision to stop using a certain derogatory racial word because she doesn't want her children to hear it and repeat it. "Now I know how white people feel."
Most notably, Sykes delivers it all with bold self-assurance, creating a sense of pride in her family's follies that serves to remind us that laughing at our own embarrassing moments is often the best recourse in a crazy world.
Zach Freeman is a freelance critic.
ctc-arts@tribpub.com
Twitter@ZachRunsChicago
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