...and now he's going to be directing his first film

W Kamau Bell has revealed that he was ready to quit comedy – until he became inspired to discuss racism on stage.

And he says now ‘even Chris Rock says I talk about racism too much’.

Bell was speaking to Stuart Goldsmith on an episode of his Comedians’ Comedian podcast recorded at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival yesterday.

He recalled doing the New Faces showcase at the Canadian event in the mid-2000s and bombing, his dreams of returning home with a manager and agent dashed.

But the low point came when he played a series of dates to ‘bored teenagers’ serving at US military bases in Okinawa. ‘I would eat shit every night,’ he recalled, ‘I thought I would quit.’

He added that when he returned home: ‘I took some time off, and started reading a lot of stuff about racism. I thought I wanted to do something like that, which you can't do in stand-up.’

Bell found a way to talk about the topic in his one-man show, which came to Edinburgh in 2011. But he said that generally stand-up has become too narrow in its possibilities.

‘It has to be in a limited sort of place, where alcohol is served, with a limited range of topics, delivered in short bursts, and with the idea that you have to change the topic every few minutes,’ he said. And while there are increasing opportunities to perform comedy in different ways ‘there is the feeling among comics that you’re not a proper comedian unless you play the clubs’.

Bell now hosts the CNN series United Shades of America, which addresses serious issues with a sometimes comic bent. He is currently in pre-production for a third series, and revealed that he was directing his first documentary film – although refused to be drawn on the details.

The comic said that although he is often praised for being in his work, ‘I don't mind appearing dumb’ – saying it shows a vulnerability and an honesty that he doesn’t have all the answers.

‘In America. we do a thing where people, if they read a tweet, they think they know the whole story,’ he said.

And he said he largely refrained from joking about Donald Trump because the President made it too easy.

‘As a comedian. it’s like the Californian gold rush,’ he said. ‘But you’re coming away with just rocks. 

‘Trump is his own punchline – you have to find the thing behind the thing to be different.’

Published: 30 Jul 2017