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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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Blocks: I Wish I Knew w/ Neal Brennan · W. Kamau Bell · 1 May 2025 podcast

They're going to tell people they saw you. If you ever pop up in a newspaper article because you – They're going to send it to 10 people. Exactly. Like these are your people, and so I want you to be prepared for your people. So just to build the context so that like if – because –

In Oakland, if some black woman they don't know comes up and hugs them, it might be a little bit strange because this is not the same as the South. It's not totally different. There are certainly black women who will hug you in Oakland. I want to be clear about that. But the South, it's just very concentrated, which is why I'm glad I said that.

100%, yeah. No, I think that like it's – I think that – every American should spend some time in the South, because I think a lot of us sort of like, even comics, we go, we play the club, but you don't actually hang out.

So for me, I've been going to Mobile since I was a kid, and I think it like totally, I think it explains a lot of my life, why I sort of am able to move around a lot and be in a lot of different places, because I was going from like Boston to Mobile, and those are two very different and very similar places with weird accents.

And I sort of got to understand that like America is a lot of different things. And I think that like Especially with black people. Most black people in this country live in the South.

Well, there's different versions of it, but there's like in the North, they don't care how high you get as long as you don't get too close. In the South, they don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too high. So the idea being that in the North, you can be a black doctor, but don't move into my neighborhood.

Whereas in the South, they're like, I'd rather you live next to me than be a black doctor. You can move in. Yeah, you can move in. Just don't go to med school. And also, it's a legacy of enslavement. White people in the South are used to black people in a way that white people in the North are not used to black people. Still getting used to it. Still working it out 140 years later. I don't know.

This is a thing I learned because I was working on projects about schools. Overwhelmingly integration went better in the south than it went in places like Boston. Why? Because black and white people in the South are more used to being around each other. Right. So there certainly are stories, but just generally, it went way worse in Boston than it went in lots of places.

Sure, yeah. No, I'm not talking about violent. Certainly there's a legacy of lynchings in the South. But in the North, they weren't lynchings. They were just police brutality. So it just is a different name.

Glad we started with the fun stuff. God bless. God bless.

I hope it works better for you.

That wasn't my catchphrase. White atheism, is it? You must be a white atheist. But no, I remember that because For some reason, yeah, I remember when you got to me, I was just like, in my mind, why would I say no? What would I be holding on to if I said no to this thing that is already out in the world? The only thing I was worried about is if somebody sees it and thinks you stole it.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, but other than that, I was like, you know. I'm a big understander in parallel thinking. Yeah, that's the thing.

Now if you're like, I have this joke about your daughter. Wait a minute. But no, I just think that like, and also I think it's also about the fact that, I remember that emo Phillips thing. If you have a thousand jokes and somebody steals three, Well, you still got like 997 jokes. But if you have three jokes and somebody steals one, who the hell would you try to make it with three jokes? Yeah.

Someday. Someday. I hope it's about nine hours.

I've deleted this. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's on Paramount+. It was on Showtime, but I don't think Showtime exists, but it's on Paramount+, and you can buy it on all the things.

So yeah, so it all started as like, I mean, for years, I'll say this, like, you know, like... come up with a generation where Bill Cosby's the guy, Cosby Show, I'm the same age as those kids. So I would sort of track all the parts of him and like, oh, what happened when he did the pound cake speech?

So then after all the crimes came out, after I believed them and realized I did believe them, I don't know at what point I did, but at some point I was like, yeah, this should happen.

It's hard to track. In the doc, I say that. I remember when I got into comedy, the two things I heard, the gossip was that Robin Williams steals material and Bill Cosby's a philanderer. Like that was the, that's what I heard. But I mean, I'm an open mic comedian. It's like, well, I guess now that I'm a comedian, I get to know the secrets.

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