Berkeley’s stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell sat down and wrote a book.
Berkeley comedian Bell’s first book riffs on Trump, pop culture and much more
Ever since Donald Trump’s unexpected election-night victory, scarily bleak “Mad Max”-like visions have haunted the mind of W. Kamau Bell.
In the introduction to his hilarious new book, the Berkeley sociopolitical comedian likens the tone and feel of the country to the day before everything “turned into a post-apocalyptic desert and people began paying thirty bucks for an ounce of water.”
Directly addressing his readers, he wonders if they’ve come here because it seems like a good book “to end the world with?”
Part memoir, part manifesto, the 340-page tome is Bell’s first, and it just might carry the year’s most longwinded title: “The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6’ 4,” African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian.”
Whew. Say that three times fast.
Bell wanted to write the book as a way “to grapple with some of the questions that this crazy, upsidedown time” has produced, both in him and other citizens. While doing so, the words didn’t always come easily.
“I thought I would have this Stephen King thing where I would wake up every morning, have coffee and proceed to type prose for eight hours,” he says during a phone interview.
But it didn’t go down that way.
Instead, Bell found himself on the road shooting segments for his CNN documentary series “United Shades of America” and trying to piece together passages during spare moments while rumbling across the country in a van.
“So the book probably feels a little hectic,” he admits. “But then, so does the country.”
In “Awkward Thoughts,” Bell, as usual, uses humor as a way to delve into a wide range of topics, including race relations, politics, fatherhood, marriage, the need for pop cultural diversity and what people opposed to Trump can do to fight back.
On the latter subject, he writes, “I think everybody has to make a commitment to themselves and their communities to do more and get less. Less sleep. Less caught up on their favorite shows. Less satisfaction from fighting with Internet trolls . ... If you’re a Democratic suburban white mom who changed her Facebook avatar to ‘I’m with her’ and that’s all you did … then you need to do more.”
But Trump certainly doesn’t dominate “Awkward Thoughts.” Bell spends plenty of pages allowing readers to get up close and personal. For example, he recalls what it was like to grow up a black nerd, aka “blerd” — someone who was riveted to television, idolized the Hulk, Spider-Man and Bruce Lee and wasn’t all that much into hip-hop and basketball.
He also writes about his interracial relationship with Dr. Melissa Hudson Bell, Ph.D., a white woman whom he married in 2009 and has two daughters with. It’s a relationship that he admits had him contemplating divorce during his turbulent and pressure-filled stint as host of the late-night cable show, “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell.”
“All the stuff about my marriage and family was the hardest stuff to write,” says. “You want to be honest and open with readers, but how far do you go? Melissa’s parents are going to read this, too. … There’s a line.”
He also toed that line when writing about his days on “Totally Biased,” a show produced by Chris Rock that received plenty of critical love, but never took off in the ratings. It was a mostly chaotic, exhausting and joyless experience for Bell, who clashed with the showrunner and grew frustrated that a series that was supposed to feature a black man’s voice carried a staff of mostly white writers. The series was canceled in 2013, after airing for just a year.
“Some of what happened on that show still pisses me off, even if most of the failings were my own, and it produced some of my best work,” Bell says. “I think it was important for me to talk about how hard ‘Totally Biased’ was on me. Plus, there’s a lot of talk right now about diversity and representation in Hollywood, and I think my story reflects that.”
Bell insists that he’s in a “much healthier, happier” place these days. “United Shades,” an Emmy-nominated series that gained widespread attention for an episode that had its host meeting with members of the Ku Klux Klan, launches its second season on April 30. Also, he continues to co-host two podcasts and a public radio talk show.
Best of all: In June he plans a return to standup comedy, an art form he calls the “purest expression” of what he does for a living.
“Everything else is like the hot dogs at Costco,” he says of his other projects. “Standup is the 70-inch TV screen.”