8768: Trashing Trump.

The New York Daily News reported that Wanda Sykes is not among the Blacks that Donald Trump has a good relationship with.

Wanda Sykes says Donald Trump is racist, fame-hungry: ‘He’s not happy unless he’s relevant’

By Shari Weiss, Daily News Staff Writer

Count Wanda Sykes as one of the many people who won’t vote for Donald Trump if he runs for president in 2012.

“He’s not happy unless he’s relevant in some way,” she told The Vancouver Sun. “He wants people to be talkin’ about him.”

“I thought he would be happy enough to finally have a decent season of ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ Sykes continued, “but, you know, he had to make a little bit more noise than that, I guess.”

But the comedienne isn’t one of the viewers tuning in to the NBC series and she would never consider an offer to compete.

“I would never want to be on that show,” Wykes said. “If I wind up on that show, it’s all over for me, I really messed up. I killed somebody. I murdered a whole family.”

Birthers, she said, are using the disproven notion that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America as a cover for their racist beliefs.

“I feel sorry for ‘em; they’re just sad,” Sykes said of the growing group of which Trump is proudly a member. “I love that they’re hangin’ it on ‘Well, he’s not from this country’ when they should just face it: You’re havin’ issues because a black man is president.”

“That’s what it is, and you need to deal with that, to work with that,” she added.

But when it comes to the almost equally fame-hungry Charlie Sheen, who has been touring the country with a live show, Sykes doesn’t view him with the same venomous eyes she does Trump.

“I can’t get mad at the person,” says Sykes, “because it takes the audience to make them a celebrity.”

“But hey, if that’s how people want to be entertained, if people want to see a train wreck,” she continued, “Charlie Sheen does a really good train wreck.”

7224: Diversifying Late-White TV.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Wanda Sykes, George Lopez bring new comedy, new colors to white men’s late-night TV domain

By Lynn Elber, AP Television Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — In the blink of an eye, late-night TV is shifting from a white men’s club to the start of a rainbow coalition.

Wanda Sykes’ weekly Fox comedy show debuts 11 p.m. EST Saturday, followed by George Lopez’s four-night-a-week talk show on TBS, starting 11 p.m. EST Monday. They join “The Mo’Nique Show” on BET.

Lopez is counting on an audience hungry for something different — as in the first Hispanic to host a nighttime talk show on a major network, cable or broadcast.

Sykes is the first black late-night host since the late 1990s, when celebrities Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Keenan Ivory Wayans tried and failed to follow in Arsenio Hall’s successful 1989-94 footsteps.

“There’s a huge percentage of people not watching late-night TV at all,” Lopez said, figuring that the shows headlined by hosts including David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel draw from roughly the same audience pool.

For people of color, the actor and comedian said, “I don’t think a lot of their needs are met with the current talk shows. I would pull a different audience.”

Shari Anne Brill, an analyst with media-buyer Carat USA in New York, echoes Lopez’s assertion.

“There is a huge, growing multicultural population in this country, and the current late-night fare doesn’t really take them into account,” she said.

But neither Lopez nor Sykes are talking about practicing exclusionary TV. Lopez’s ABC sitcom drew a cross-section of viewers, and Sykes said she expects her show to attract the same mixed crowd she gets at her standup appearances.

“Young, old, male, female, all races, gay, straight. I love the audience that I draw,” Sykes said.

She rebuts the idea she got the job because of her gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation (the actress-comedian, who appears on CBS’ “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” came out as gay in 2008).

“I do understand the importance of being on a late-night talk show as a black, gay woman. But I’ve been at this for 20 years. I don’t think they (networks) were saying, ‘Hey, it would be fun to get a black woman on late-night. Who fits that role?’

“I got this show in spite of being a black lesbian,” she said, adding that viewers will tune in to see her or Lopez and not a type.

“It’s all driven by the host. It’s not what you’re getting from a minority, it’s us,” Sykes said.

She doesn’t see an “Obama effect” in the sudden late-night diversity, given that she was approached before the election of the first African-American U.S. president. But Lopez said his interest was piqued as he campaigned for the Democratic candidate.

“Being with Barack for a year and seeing the people and how their eyes and their faces filled with hope for him, for this country … and, on a very smaller scale, to have a show that is fun and can galvanize people and bring them together” was appealing, he said.

The two shows, as sketched by their hosts, will take different approaches.

Lopez promises to bring “the party back to late-night,” signaling a looser, hipper hour in the tradition of “The Arsenio Hall Show,” said analyst Bill Carroll of media buyer Katz Television in New York. Sykes is planning Bill Maher-type panels with both lighthearted and serious discussion of politics and culture as part of her mix.

“In some ways, these shows are looking at breaking the mold,” Carroll said. “Lopez Tonight,” he suggests, could be “what late-night might look like in the future.”

Sykes, whose show replaces Fox’s “Mad TV,” could compete successfully in her partial overlap with NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” analyst Brill said. “Viewers could watch her show and then switch to ‘SNL’ in time for the news, which is the only part that’s funny anyway.”

Eva Longoria-Parker, Ellen DeGeneres and Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant are the scheduled debut night guests for Lopez. Sykes will welcome Mary Lynn Rajskub of “24,” Daryl “Chill” Mitchell of “Brothers” and “The Amazing Race” host Phil Keoghan.

John Ridley, head writer for Sykes, said he’s wary of asserting that the show will “blow apart” the late-night model.

“If you look at all the shows, they’re not different. Are we going to have a monologue? Absolutely. Guests? Yes. A panel? Yes. But it reflects Wanda’s sensibility,” he said.

And that, it’s safe to say, is not akin to what Carroll calls the “predominantly middle-aged — to be kind — white men” that have long dominated late-night.

6731: When Comedians Attack.

From The New York Daily News…

David Feherty shouldn’t get pass for tasteless joke — but neither should Wanda Sykes

By Mike Lupica

Here is what David Feherty, a golf guy who poses no threat to the memory of Lenny Bruce, wrote in a Dallas magazine recently:

“If you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama Bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and Bin Laden would be strangled to death.”

Not funny. An old joke, tastelessly retold. Feherty of CBS — who once wrote a book called “Somewhere in Ireland a Village is Missing an Idiot” — is drawing fire because of it. But you have to wonder how a similar joke might have played at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night, as long as it was about a Republican.

Because here are a couple of jokes Wanda Sykes wrote and then delivered to that crowd:

“You know, you might want to look into this, [President Obama], because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight. …

“Rush Limbaugh hopes the country fails? I hope his kidneys fail, how ‘bout that?”

Somehow Ms. Sykes got laughs with this material, and draws no fire. It is all supposed to be about the setting, or so we are told. President Obama was there, the dinner is always the Washington version of a Friars Club Roast, just without the Sopranos language.

So Sykes, a comedian, gets a pass because of where she was, and whom she was talking about. And maybe who she is. David Feherty, who fancies himself a bit of a comic himself, doesn’t, at least not so far. As always, the rules on all this change from day to day like baseball’s strike zone.

This isn’t about condoning what Feherty wrote. It sure isn’t about running interference for Limbaugh. He has become the clown at the right-wing circus and has had the bully pulpit for a long time, not just banging away at people who think like President Obama — or Wanda Sykes for that matter — for a long time.

Limbaugh is another gasbag in this country who has gotten rich on meanness, and so if he is getting a taste of his own medicine now, prescription or otherwise, that is probably just swell with the people he has trampled on the way to the buffet table. Then the bank.

But what if Limbaugh, white talk show host, goes on the air and says that Sykes, black comedian, is about half-a-terrorist and that, oh by the way, he hopes she dies? Is he allowed to say he’s just an entertainer, and tell everybody to lighten up?

Feherty? He has been condemned by representatives from Pelosi and Reid and even the PGA Tour. CBS issued a statement that said, “Feherty’s column for a Dallas magazine is an unacceptable attempt at humor and is not in any way condoned.”

It remains to be seen whether Feherty, whose work on television I usually like, and whose writing I like a lot, will be forced to issue an apology. Or if he might even lose his job over this. This is what Pelosi’s spokesperson, Nadeam Elshami, said about the things Feherty wrote in D magazine, in what was supposed to be a piece about George W. Bush moving back to Dallas:

“Such comments are beyond the pale and an insult to our patriotic men and women in uniform.”

Really? It sounds like they are a whole lot more insulting to Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid. But if context does matter here — which it only occasionally does when the thought police get righteously cranked up about something and turn into vigilantes — it is worth pointing out that Feherty has become a tireless, passionate advocate for injured soldiers. Pelosi went to Iraq this weekend? Feherty has been there, too.

It doesn’t get him over on what he said. We’ll probably find out soon enough exactly how much trouble he has gotten himself into. He thought Pelosi, liberal Democrat, was fair game. Limbaugh thinks everybody who disagrees with him is fair game.

Wanda Sykes thought Limbaugh, a loudmouth white conservative, was big game, thought she could say whatever she wanted because she had the bully pulpit for a night, and she didn’t have to take it from Limbaugh anymore, she could dish it out.

And if Nancy Pelosi had been in the room, she would have laughed along with everybody else, for the best reason in the world: It wasn’t about her.