W. Kamau Bell

speaker

1,269 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 14 Oct

W. Kamau Bell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

Appearances

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Mick Unplugged · W. Kamau Bell & Glenn Singleton: Confronting Race: Courageous Conversations That Matter · 17 Jun 2025 podcast

And if you haven't figured out a way to have a friend group that is also smart enough in different areas and have enough different experiences and backgrounds that you don't feel like you can be lovingly called in and you don't have people who can do that, then you need to look at yourself and go, who did I surround myself with?

This goes back to the Lil Wayne album.

Clearly, Lil Wayne is not surrounded by people who can be like, hey, man, maybe not 19 tracks.

Maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda is not the right producer for you.

Whatever.

He doesn't have those people around him.

So understand, don't end up in that situation is what I'm saying.

And then...

you have to know that you're going to say something wrong sometime.

If you're trying, and I know this as a stand-up comedian, if we don't try to say the wrong thing, we're never going to say the funny thing.

Now, sometimes the wrong thing is so wrong, people write you up in an article about it.

But I feel like that's just the nature of the business.

And you just got to, as a stand-up comedian, you know, I'm never going to go through what Lenny Bruce went through, or where he got arrested for saying the wrong thing.

Although maybe I am now.

We're going to a different era of America.

Maybe that's coming back again.

But I just feel like, you know, I'm never going to go through what Dick Gregory went through performing at the Playboy Club in front of a group of white people for the first time a black comic had done that in this country that we know of.

I'm not going to go through that situation.

So, you know, as I talked about, I think I talked about that at the Kennedy Center.

Whenever I start to get caught up in my own, like, what if I say the wrong thing or why is this so hard?

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