Race + Comedy: W. Kamau Bell Rises Above The Curve With New Show
“Comedy is like anything else in America–it’s dominated by a white, male, straight guy perspective” explains Bell. “As a result, comedy clubs are also dominated by white straight males, to the point that even the people who go there to perform have their perspective colored by straight white maleness. Even though [a comedian] may not want to do material about straight white male things, they still end up talking about things that straight white males will enjoy because there’s a sense that you’re in a playground for white maleness.”
Bell is nonplussed about the systemic social constraints to his style of comedy though, making him either the Horatio Alger of stand-up or yet another POC comedian to be calloused by reality. When asked about how he felt about his comedy in relation to the system, Bell says, “I don’t take issue with the comics and the clubs. Just like you can’t be mad at how McDonalds doesn’t have beet salads–it’s on me to do the self-promotion necessary to get the people who want to see my type of comedy.”
The choice to do comedic material outside the boundaries of the “playground” is just that, though: a choice, and one that Bell consciously made several years ago.
“Some comics do start out with an agenda, a very clear ‘voice,’” reflects Bell, “but I didn’t have a really clear voice when I first started out. For years I’d be going ‘What about this?’; ‘What about this?’ and sometimes I would talk about race and people would really back off and I’d think, ‘Well I guess I don’t want to talk about that,’ and then I’d talk about other things. But I would get really bored talking about things I didn’t care about, and somewhere around 2005-2007, I made a commitment to only talk about what I really cared about. For me, a good comic makes an audience make choices: ‘Am I with this, or am I against this’?”
For all the work it’s taken him to create such a niche audience for himself, it comes as a surprise to hear Bell say that his material isn’t intentionally educational; race and social systems just happen to be two topics that he’s particularly drawn to, with pratfalls and silliness worked into his sets in equal measure alongside his more nuanced material. That’s why in the spirit of identity politics, it does Bell a disservice to reduce his work to “Race and Blackness”–he’s just as interested in being goofy as he is in being insightful.
“I don’t think I’m much smarter than most other comedians,” begins Bell. “I just think that comedy clubs invite you to play from the lowest level of your intelligence. The thing that I love about stand-up comedy is that it’s like any other conversation between two adults–sometimes it’s really smart and sometimes it’s really stupid and I sort of like to go back and forth between the two poles instead of staying with really stupid.”
This tension between the silly and the serious is part of Bell’s appeal though. According to Dylan Gadino, editor-in-chief and founder of the comedy news site LaughSpin (formerly Punchline Magazine), “the thing about Kamau, besides that he’s funny, is that he can do social and political commentary and then just be goofy and joke about observational everyday things. What makes his comedy so appealing is that you can enjoy him on multiple levels. He’s a good comic who will make you laugh and if you care about social commentary he gives plenty of that as well.”
Built in part on the success of the “Curve” and his 2010 comedy album Face Full of Flour (winner of Punchline/LaughSpin and iTunes’ Top 10 Best Comedy Album of 2010 award), Bell’s work eventually pricked the tough and notoriously unyielding hide of comedic success just enough to get him noticed by Chris Rock. Following a surprise visit from after one of his shows, Rock asked Bell if he’d ever thought about doing a television show; Bell says he proceeded to shelve the idea under “Excellent Life Plan.”
The development of their conversation into a course of action had to take a hiatus though, as both Rock and Bell pursued other projects (e.g. Rock, Broadway; Bell, a baby), with Bell finally getting down to work this past autumn on an independently produced pilot, which Rock then pitched to several television network executives.
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