W. Kamau Bell Quotes

You pretty much have to be bad at it [stand-up] for several years to get good at it, so there's no avoiding embarrassing yourself.

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.

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.

Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google "clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, "Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: "to me." They should be saying, "Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say "to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm.

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.

When art sets racism in the past, no matter how good it is, it allows white people in the audience (and others) to say to themselves "Wow! That racism sure was bad way back then!" It's what happens when people go see 12 Years a Slave. My response is always, "Yeah, you wanna know another time when racism was bad? Earlier today.

And when I attempted to point this out he accused me of both not "getting the joke" and not being fun. He literally said, "Can't we just have a good time?" In other words, once again, his white man lens is the only lens. His definition of fun is the only way to have fun. It is a classic move of this white guy.

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.

It may sound like I am making too much out of all this, but the only way you can allow a kid to truly dream is if you expand their idea of what is currently possible. A kid who has nothing, sees nothing, and is taught nothing can only dream of breakfast. They can only hope to get to the next moment successfully. I want more than that for my kids...just like my mom wanted more than that for me. And I want them to want more than that too.

Comedy is like expensive cheese. Well, it's like cheese, in general. Everybody likes what they like, and everything they don't like, they think is the worst.

Maybe your aunt is funny in quiet moments with her friends because like many women her age, she was taught to not draw attention to herself. And maybe she also noticed how men of her generation weren't attracted to the women who spoke out of turn and uttered their own opinions out loud. And certainly these types of men weren't attracted to women who were funnier than them. Women have always been funny. They just weren't interested in sharing their jokes with you. Truth in point, my mom is hilarious. She has also been single since 1974.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

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

I'm of the opinion that if you step on stage and you're not a straight white male, you're automatically making a political statement whether you know it or not.

I pointed to a Black man standing nearby and said, "If I had said something up there on that stage today that was crazy, that Black man - even though he doesn't know me - would have pulled me aside and asked me what the fuck I was talking about. I told him that white people need to do the same thing.

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.

The best version of comedy is when you can get to an issue where, at some point, you're not firmly on one side or the other, and you can see both sides. The more we become about the issues, the more successful we are.