Humor & Life Quote by Wanda Sykes

There is a quiet brutality in the word "impression". Wanda Sykes is talking about comedy as mimicry before it becomes voice: a performer doing the outline of "a comic" instead of the riskier work of being herself onstage. The line lands because it’s both self-indictment and industry indictment. She’s not confessing a lack of talent; she’s pointing at a template that gets handed down - cadence, posture, acceptable topics, even the shape of a punchline - and the pressure to fit it if you want the room to like you, the booker to rebook you, the camera to stay on you.

The subtext is about permission. Early-career comics, especially women and especially Black women, don’t get infinite runway to be messy in public. "Supposed to do" carries the weight of gatekeeping: audiences trained to expect a certain swagger, an approved kind of aggression, a narrow band of relatability. Doing an "impression" is survival and camouflage, a way to be legible in a system that rewards familiarity more than specificity.

Sykes also smuggles in a larger idea about craft. Comedy isn’t just jokes; it’s a persona with an implied worldview. When the persona is borrowed, the laughs can still come, but they’re transactional - you’re delivering a product that resembles comedy. Her best work has always felt like an argument with the room, not a performance for it, and this sentence is the hinge between those modes: the moment she names the mask so she can take it off.