Comedian W. Kamau Bell on race and American politics
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Stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell will appear Friday at the Fitzgerald Theater for Wits. Before arriving in St. Paul, he spoke with Tom Weber about how he got his start in comedy, what it's like as a black man to work on TV and the inevitable comparisons between The Daily Show and his show, Totally Biased.
On Fresh Air last year, Bell talked about discovering his own prejudices when he started doing comedy:
"When I started doing my solo show, one of my good friends, Martha, said to me, she's like, 'Kamau, you can't end racism and make sexism worse.' And I was like, 'What do you mean by that?' And she went through my solo show and pointed out all the different parts of it that she felt were sexist. And that's a good friend, a friend who will tell you that in a way that you can hear. And that was a real revelation for me ... that you can't sort of pick your issue over other people's issue — that if you want to end the ignorance of something, you have to end all the ignorances or at least not make some of the ignorances worse."
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