She also did a wonderful if more conventional bit about having sex while children were in the house that did not rest on the joke of the youngsters interrupting so much as the threat. It’s the anxiety that quickly veers into paranoia that Sykes dramatizes in a few gestures. And yet, these domestic scenes are always mixed with bracing and incisive takes on issues of the day that dig into the musty language of political argument to find humor. For instance, she has the funniest rebuttal you will ever hear to trickle-down economics, which boils down to an unavoidable truth: “Nothing good trickles.”

“What Happened” didn’t get the attention it deserved, perhaps because it premiered on Epix. On Twitter, she said she went with that channel because she was offended by the offer from Netflix, after the comic Mo'Nique raised the question about pay equity on the powerful streaming service.

Sykes’s follow-up, “Not Normal,” is her Netflix premiere, and she suggested to Variety that speaking up might have helped her negotiating position. It’s similar in subject matter to “What Happened … Ms. Sykes, ” Ping-Ponging between politics and her family, but the material is thinner, the connective tissue not as polished as it could be. She has too many lines that get applause as opposed to laughs.

In part, she suffers from the challenge that has stymied many comics in specials lately: coming up with a new slant on Donald J. Trump in a rapidly shifting news cycle. “It’s not normal that I know I’m smarter than the president,” she jokes. She has more success when she shifts from the politics of the president to those of “The Bachelor.” She has contempt for that show, and suggests that this is not the time for women to overlook its sexism: “The only time you hear #MeToo on ‘The Bachelor’ is when someone says ‘I have chlamydia.’”

The freshest material here is toward the end when she does more than 10 minutes on aging. Many female comics (Rita Rudner, Elayne Boosler) have been exploring this subject, but none with the force that Sykes does in describing its physical impact, including hot flashes. Is this a design flaw or something else, she asks. “When you get older, you can’t bring life into the world, so they set you on fire.”

As Sykes gets worked up about a subject, she can be ferocious, and much of her television work takes comic advantage of this.