W. Kamau Bell Quotes

I think the need to go on stage speaks to some sort of a profound psychological deficit, but something that happened when you were a kid. Or something your parents did.

That’s the nature of my [stand-up] act: black man with a white baby.

I feel like you can share as many jokes as you want to because no joke you do on Twitter is ever gonna be so big on Twitter, for the most part, that you can’t say it on stage that same night.

We could do something set in the 21st century, where I travel around to lots of different places and we talk to different ethnicities and lots of different racial and religious minorities, so it’s not just the black-and-white America; it hasn’t been that since the ’90s.

I’m a dad, and that’s really important to me, and I realize now that I’m a dad that it’s a major part of my identity.

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

What am I unbiased about? Let’s see. I don’t think about being unbiased, at all. With the entertainment industry, there was a point at which I felt like I had to be not only pro-myself but anti-others.

There is a linear way in which black comedians are expected to talk about race by all audiences – black people are like this, white people are like this – and it really is hard to break through that. I never was doing it that way.

A lot of comics claimed to be political comedians when George W. Bush was in office just by calling him an idiot. For me, Obama is actually more interesting comically, because not everybody can figure it out.

I think a lot of people get into stand-up to be the center of attention, which is perfectly legitimate. But I think I got in there to be heard.

You might not agree with something, but it doesn’t mean you don’t need to listen to it. White people have to accept that they don’t always know about racism.

If I could email my jokes to the crowd and get the same immediate response [as during stand-up], I’d do that.