Living on the Bell Curve

Living on the Bell Curve

The Berkeley socio-political comedian lets the funny come out.

In January, Berkeley comedian W. Kamau Bell was chatting with his wife, Melissa, and some of her new mom friends at a table outside the Elmwood Cafe when a café worker knocked on the window and told him to scram. Apparently the worker thought that Bell, who is black, was trying to sell something to Melissa, who is white and has a Ph.D. Appalled, Melissa complained to the management, and a small media firestorm ensued. The cafe fired the offending worker and promised changes. As unpleasant as it was, it may provide fodder for future material for Kamau. He’s in the market, hard at work on his second network TV show, CNN’s The United Shades of America. I caught up with the socio-political comedian to find out how the People’s Republic of Berkeley has been treating him.

Paul Kilduff: You have said that you and your family do not plan to go back to the Elmwood Cafe. Is that really in the spirit of progress?

W. Kamau Bell: We’re not at that place yet. I think that we have to look at things over a long timeline sometimes. It’s about wanting to be in there not thinking about what happened to us. I would like to have a meal in there without thinking about the thing that happened when we had our last meal there. And I was also thinking that if we rush back in there, then it looks like I want to prove something. [Elmwood Cafe owner] Michael [Pearce] and his manager are working hard on changing the public face of the Elmwood Café, and as that happens, we will eventually go back.

PK: You have blogged about being actually recognized sometimes. What’s that like?

WKB: I’ve hung out—because we worked on Totally Biased, I’m not name dropping—with Chris Rock. He can’t really step 15 feet without somebody recognizing him. And he gave me good advice about when people recognize you on how to deal with it so it doesn’t get out of control. Luckily, I’m not famous enough where it ever gets out of control, but he is. We were one day just standing on a street corner talking, and suddenly there were people videotaping our conversation with their cell phones. Like, what are they going to do with this?

PK: Yeah, that’s crazy. I like my anonymity.

WKB: We realized we wanted to live in the Bay Area, but that automatically cuts back potential fame for me. It’s not available. I get emailed once a week or so from some network like MSNBC—will you comment on this? And it’s like I don’t live where you are.

PK: What about Skype?

WKB: Certainly there are times when you can do that, but when you’re a comedian and you Skype in, that little delay sucks the funny out of everything. That’s another thing I’ve learned: You want to be in the room with the people.

PK: You seem to have journalistic ambitions with your new show. How much is journalism and how much is comedy?

WKB: I don’t want to say things that are factually wrong, but it’s not coming from a sense of journalism, as far as I’m not trying to tell an unbiased story or give equal time, which is a big part of journalism. To me it’s more like the opinion page of the newspaper. You want to make sure the facts are right, but you also get to vamp on your opinion. If I can do that, I feel the funny will just come. But I also appreciate the fact that with the new show, the funny is allowed to come and go as it’s appropriate, but there’s not a pressure to make it funnier than it would be under its own circumstance.

PK: Getting back to the race thing, it seems like white comedians never talk about race, at least the ones I’m aware of. Is it just that they don’t want to, or is it that it would not be accepted by the audience?

WKB: If you were to spend a night at the Comedy Cellar in New York City, you’d hear a lot of white comedians talking about race. Maybe it’s the clubs you go to; maybe it’s a Bay Area thing. But certainly if you go to the Comedy Cellar, and on the bill is Louis C.K. and Bill Burr, they will talk about race. Nick DiPaolo—he’ll talk about race. I think there’s a New York style of comedy where they’re sitting on the subway together and they are free to talk about each other. But I would say the other thing is that white people in general don’t talk about race.

PK: That’s my greater point. I mean white people arguably have caused all the racial strife in the world, and yet we don’t ever talk about it.

WKB: Well, thank you for taking the credit. You can say you said that. Don’t say I said that. I would say white people only think about their race in comparison to another race. Whereas the rest of us think about race from the moment we wake up to the time we go to sleep. As a person of color, I am always thinking, ‘How is my race affecting the situation?’ And I think that white people, if there’s no other people around of a different race, they suddenly feel like they get to be race neutral, which is not a thing. In my solo show, I talk about all the time that white people need to find some white pride—the good white people. White pride has been coopted by the Klan and Neo-Nazis. I feel like if good, regular white people found white pride, then they would be better able to handle race conversations. Because now if you try to have a race conversation out of the blue with a white person, their reaction is either, ‘I don’t really see race,’ which is not helpful. Or it’s like, ‘I’m not even white; I’m actually German and Dutch and Scottish.’ That equation adds up to white, sir.

PK: So what would this new sort of white pride entail?

WKB: The thing that pride does—I’ll speak for black people—allows you to feel good about yourself when the world is telling you to feel bad about yourself. For white people, pride is not neutral and free, like the way black people can say, ‘I’m really proud of jazz music. I’m just proud that we invented jazz. Good for us for inventing jazz.’ There’s those version of whiteness that white people have pride in but they don’t attach their race to, because that makes them feel like a Klan member. So I feel like when a white person says something like, ‘Man, I like Mumford & Sons so much; it really speaks to me.’ Well, that’s probably a little bit of white pride there.

PK: Mumford & Sons—code for white pride. You’re onto something.

WKB: And I got no problem with Mumford & Sons. The Bay Area helped me sort of evolve on this. I’m a huge Bruce Lee fan. He lived in San Francisco for a while, and there was an exhibition at a hotel in Chinatown of Bruce Lee memorabilia, and I went; and I was like nobody is a bigger Bruce Lee fan than me, absolutely nobody. I got there and looked at the faces of the Chinese people who were there, and I was like, nobody except everybody in this room. Because he means something different to them than he means to me. It doesn’t mean I can’t be a fan of Bruce Lee, but I have to recognize that in Dave Chappelle’s racial draft, these people get Bruce Lee, because he means something culturally and racially to them that he can never mean to me.

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W. KAMAU BELL Vital Stats

Age: 42

Astrological Sign: Aquarius

Graduate of: University of Chicago Laboratory High School; attended University of Pennsylvania; dropped out to pursue comedy career..

Book On Nightstand: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

Motto: Alec Baldwin’s line from the movie State and Main (2000): “So, that happened.”

Website: www.WKamauBell.com

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