I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have somebody who I adore, who like takes topics and delves in them in ways that usually are intimidating to a lot of white folk but yet is able to get real dialogue out of it, but none other than W. Kamal Bell. How you feeling today?

Oh, thank you for that intro. I appreciate it, brother. You know how much I respect you.

Yeah, no, you keep it 100 all the time. The first thing I want to talk about with you is the

arc of your career. Like, how did you land in comedy and television?

Talk about how you ended up where you are today because people see you with all these

shows and they're like, what, where do you have that happen? Yeah, well know, this is the standard show business career. You know, you'd be a little black boy who loves Saturday Night Live and thinks Eddie Murphy is the same age as you and you go, I want to do that when I grow up I always wanted to be a

stand-up comedian from the moment I realized I couldn't actually be

Spider-Man like the superhero not an actor playing Spider-Man and I just and so I started doing comedy when I was young and I think the thing that happened is when I started doing comedy in the 90s

There was this thing called the comedy boom and then the comedy bust and I started in the middle of the bust is what happened.

There was not clubs had closed, a lot of opportunity

dried up.

Comics weren't being given multimillion dollar contracts for five minutes of

material.

And so for a while I just sort of was like in the wilderness of trying to figure out how to be a comedian, what I wanted to do.

And it really wasn't until I like 10 years in when I decided to like take matters into my own hands and I wrote a one person show called the

W come out bell curve ending racism in about an hour

And the gimmick was if you brought a friend of a different race you got in two for one and you know we did that in the Bay Area so there are lots of people taking advantage of that gimmick.

And Chris Rock saw a version of that show and that basically kicked my career into high gear because he

produced my first TV show when that got canceled I got United Shades and now I'm talking to you.

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