Name: Wanda Sykes Worked At The NSA Before Comedy Career | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T16:41:56.000Z
Duration: 5 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past continuous

I was thinking about you yesterday and today, and that's scary.

That makes me very uncomfortable right now, thinking about you and where do you live?

When they said, hey, Wanda's here, out in the parking lot, then you started thinking about me.

The cliche, I guess, is that they'd be strict people.

My dad was like a, you know, academic and scientist, and my mom's a lawyer.

And strict in the sense that one of us going into comedy wasn't maybe their first choice.

You know, but beautiful, lovely people, but real good Catholics, Church people.

So I'm just curious if you had that experience.

Yeah, I mean, they were, you know, black people in the south, so there was always some type of structure.

when he got home, he'd take his uniform off and, you know, he was dad.

You know, that's how I fell in love with bowling, I guess, because he would, on weekends, clean the lanes.

So, yeah, so it was strict from that, you know, looking on the outside, but, yeah, inside, you know.

Yeah, they were just, like you said, a lot of values, church, all of that.

So, no, someone saying, hey, I'm gonna go do comedy.

Their question was, so, what was that college I paid for?

And now my mother, I talked to her yesterday, it was so funny, and she said.

Like, when you went in college, why didn't you just take, like, performing arts?

I'm like, oh, so now, you know, you putting it back on me.

I was like, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was like, oh, no, science.

And then you worked for the NSA for a bit.

Okay, here's my question, because a Lot of us, before we get out in front of people and start trying to be funny, we have these jobs where you're kind of funny at work.

Think of the terrorists that weren't caught because you were busy joking around.

And did you have people around you saying, hey, you gotta get up there, you gotta go?

But, you know, I was serious about the job.

But I also knew it got to a point where I was like, this, I can't do this.

This is not going to be my life, you know, because you will see, you know, the, the people who, who was on their way out to that retirement thing.

Was it a contest you entered or was it a.

Their radio station in D.C. sponsoring it.

Maybe I'll write some jokes and go audition for this.

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Wanda Sykes Worked At The NSA Before Comedy Career | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend

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