Race + Comedy: W. Kamau Bell Rises Above The Curve With New Show
By Guest Contributor Caitlin M. Boston
Courtesy: W. Kamau Bell
W. Kamau Bell stands out. Tall, broad, and Black, with a coife au naturale, his physicality doesn’t exactly lend itself to anonymity; equipped with a booming base for a voice, he really doesn’t have a hope in hell of ever going unnoticed in an American crowd. But come this autumn, the impulses behind the diffident stares and sideways glances on the street will be a little bit more difficult for Bell to decipher, hoodie up or otherwise.
That’s because Bell, a comedian who could do a stand-up routine featuring nothing but heckler retorts at this point in his career, just inked a six-episode deal with the FX network (the “coolest of all the Fox’s,” as he calls them) executive-produced by Chris Rock.
In case that last part didn’t make your eyebrows shoot up, for Bell to garner Rock’s participation amounts to an endorsement from a comedy doyen: having established himself in the game as a headliner who can perform in any comedy club, anywhere, on his own terms, praise and a partnership from Rock is synonymous to a weighty nod of approval from Yoda (albeit, Bell says, a foul-mouthed, microphone-wielding version).
Bell officially announced last Thursday that his show would be called Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, debuting Aug. 9th at 11 pm. With the show set to follow Louie, created by and starring biracial comedian Louis C. K., the two programs together constitute a rarity in network television–a progressive comedy block not led by white people.
The show’s name is a departure from Bell’s usual stylings for titles, i.e. his love of inserting the word “negro” into things, the precedent having been established by his podcast, The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture w/ Vernon Reid.
When asked about this deviation, Bell starts laughing.
“I love calling myself a negro,” he says. “It seems like that was the last time Black people got sh-t done was when they were ‘negros’ … I don’t think we want to tie it necessarily to [being] Black, because we’re not trying to get just a Black audience. Chris says all the time, “You’re Black–you’re going to get Black people, but you don’t need to be like, ‘It’s The Blackity Black Black Show!’”
This rise to primetime exposure was relatively unscripted, as Bell never had designs for a television take-over: up until a year ago he was only concentrating on performing and promoting a steady stream of projects such as his one-man comedy show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour and “Laughter Against the Machine,” a politically-pointed national comedy tour.
“I wanted to do this show, do some stand-up, and build it up slowly over time,” says Bell. “If I just find ten, twenty places in America that like me, that I can then go to every year and make a living, and do all these other things…I was in the middle of building towards that future.”
But Bell’s shows and his stand-up are political satire on steroids–it’s comedy too unconventionally good not to get noticed. At a time when jokes about oral sex are de rigueur for most American comedians, Bell’s material features a deft comedic handling of topics ranging from the ubiquity of racism in America to why country music is just the blues without slavery; an elucidation of otherwise convoluted subject matter usually aided by a PowerPoint presentation that you could only ever dream of being a part of your work’s “diversity training.”
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