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

yeah yeah uh but yeah so like all this pop culture stuff is in some level gonna at some point re like people like they don't show reruns of cosmos anymore first of all reruns are not even a thing that we really do a lot anymore anyway in the society but second of all eventually you stop showing reruns of everything you know yes gilligan's island was on everywhere when i was a kid yeah you couldn't even i couldn't explain it to my kids now you know what i mean so like

It's too stupid. Yeah. If the professor can build.

I know. So I knew, I think one of the great things about being a comedian is that your imagination is often way more fertile than other people's, than regular people's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like, I always took a ghost dog approach. I'm going to imagine, I imagined the worst things I thought could happen to me. like, from this thing. And so, and all the, not the words, just all the different things I thought this could happen, this could happen. So by the time some of those things happened, I was like, oh, I knew that was it. Yeah.

So, like, and also, they didn't firebomb my house. So, like, I had imagined that. But, like, I knew that, like, okay, somebody's going to come out with a thing that says we need to talk about Debbie Kamau Bell. That happened. That's a YouTube clip that YouTube suggested. You like Kamau Bell? And I was like, no. Good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sir. And so like, or like, I knew that the people who had the most to say about it in the negative would be people who never watched it. So even today, I will be walking down the street, happens, maybe happened six months ago, and I'll run into a black person who's around my age who's like, man, I liked everything you did except that one thing.

And I'm like, Cosby, Cosby, that Cosby thing. Yeah. And inevitably, I'll let them like, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. It's like, did you see it? Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I mean, I think if you saw it, you might, well, . And I think what happens at that moment, one, people notice that I don't run away. I don't get scared.

Because a lot of times, it's been black dudes who sort of have a little bit of that regular black energy.

Not the private school energy. But I'm also, you know, I look like... You're pretty big, though. Yeah, I'm 6'4". People are often like, you're tall.

So, exactly. That could kick in at any time. But I'm sort of very aware that, like... I'm not gonna like run away from, if you're not gonna, unless you're gonna be super rude, but if you just wanna talk, I'll talk to you. And so I've talked to many people. I was in Mr. Fab's store in Oakland one time and this black dude came in and was just like, and I sort of stood there and talked to him.

And by then he's like, all right, well, you know, like not that he was gonna go watch it, but he's like, this guy didn't run from me, you know? So I was aware that like, I was gonna be in situations with black people who were gonna have feelings about it. And I was gonna have to deal with those feelings.

And some of the, and the other thing is I knew some of those black people would be black comedians.

Yeah.

It's just like, but people think that's what it was. That's the most convenient version of it is like, he's been, he's been hired by the white man to take the black man down. And so like, you know, and all I can do is like, the great thing about it, having kids, a lot of my, what other people think about me, I just don't have time for it or energy for it. Yeah.

So it does affect me, but it doesn't affect me as much as it used to.

The Andrew Tate era of masculinity. And so I think absolutely there are, I've seen people online argue it. First of all, the other argument is everybody was doing it. White people were doing it. They didn't get caught. So why should we, even if he did do all this, why are we focusing on him?

Exactly.

Well, it's also the fact it was like, yeah, of course white guys get away with it. It's how this country works on every level. Like, why are you surprised? That's not proof of anything.

Let me simplify that for you. Don't rape. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like don't, don't, don't. You can't. Let's say if you want to be a scumbag, if you're black, it's just going to be harder. I'm sorry.

I don't get invited to all of the black spaces all the time. Were you getting invited? No, I was already sort of like, I'm always, I already smell, like I think they can smell private school on me. And that's bad. And I'm not trying to put those spaces down, but I think black guy married to a white woman is already like a, and I accept it. It's a demerit. I accept it. I'm not, I get it. I get it.

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