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Wanda Sykes is serving up another Netflix stand-up special, “Not Normal,” in which she reflects on some of her most memorable life moments, including the time she tried to ignore former first lady Michelle Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2009.

“I still kick myself about it,” she told the New York Times. “When I did the dinner, I was sitting pretty much right next to Michelle Obama. She kept trying to make conversation, but I was so focused on having to go up and perform that I was blowing her off. I think I even looked at her one time like: ‘Will you shut up? Don’t you see I’m sitting here going over my notes?’ ”

As it turned out, Obama had a sense of humor about their awkward moment.

“I saw her on her book tour, and we laughed about it. She was like, ‘I was just trying to make conversation, and you wanted nothing to do with me.’ ”

“Wanda Sykes: Not Normal” is currently streaming on Netflix and it comes three years after her Wanda Sykes’ Epix standup special.

“They came in with the best offer,” Sykes tells Variety of her Netflix deal. “They know what their numbers are, but they don’t tell you so I’m not worried about people having to tune in at a certain time. People can watch it whenever they want to watch it, so you get that long life of the special instead of after the first two weeks then it goes away. You always get people who are just now finding it. That was really appealing.”

She notes, “If you get a special on Netflix, and if you put out a good special, and then you go out on tour, your ticket sales go up,” which also held appeal.

During the chat with the Times, Sykes also touches on her departure as consulting producer from the “Roseanne” reboot after star Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet.

“I don’t even understand half of what she’s tweeting, but it’s a lot about Israel, and she’s retweeting a lot of stuff that sounds nuts,” Sykes says she told her team. “So we talked to Roseanne. She was like: I don’t know. I’m just reading stuff. There’s a lot out there. And, you know, she’s smoking weed. But whatever she’d been tweeting at that time didn’t get a lot of play.

Skyes recalls telling the creative team: ““We’ve got to get Roseanne off of Twitter. She’s going to kill us.”

Read her full Times interview here.

Michelle Obama Through The Years
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