Wanda Sykes is courting controversy with remarks she made Wednesday on CNN's Larry King Live.

The openly lesbian comedian spoke with King about her coming out, Ken Mehlman's coming out and Sarah Palin, who's increasingly backing anti-gay candidates and groups.

Sykes, who announced she's gay in 2008 to protest California's passage of a gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, said she came out late in life because she was concerned about how her parents would react.

“I have parents who are still alive that's why and you suppress all that, you bury it to try and fit in,” she told King. “I'm 46, so back then, religion everything else. You weren't exposed to gay people. … I know without a doubt my family, they love me, we're working on it.”

She wasn't holding anything back when King asked her about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“She's smart in the way that she's an opportunist but she's not smart enough to pull it off,” she said, referring to Palin's presidential aspirations. “All you have to do is just give her enough rope and she's going to say something stupid.”

“He's family, I didn't know,” Sykes said about former RNC chief Ken Mehlman, who came out gay last week. “Here's this guy, he says it's taken him like 43 years to be comfortable with himself. Which I understand, it took me awhile to publicly come out. But when he was in the Bush administration, they knew he was gay and he had to sit there and listen to all this anti-gay stuff.”

“[Mehlman] probably took so many of those showers that, you know, rape victims take, they're scrubbing themselves. He probably had a lot of those kind of showers.”

Sykes is the host of The Wanda Sykes Show, which premiered on Fox in November.