W. Kamau Bell

I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.

The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam.

When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything.

I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.

I keep trying to write the crowd-pleasing slavery joke and the crowd-pleasing reparations joke, but any time you mention slavery or reparations in any detail, it seems to bum lots of people out. That's a challenge I keep putting in front of myself.

Most people have the ability to turn their empathy engine back on, but there's such a seductive burn to not being empathetic.

Over the years, I'd hear Jon Stewart disavow being a journalist and say, 'No, I'm a comedian.' I'd be like, 'Stop pretending. You know you're a journalist.'

There's a lot of power in laughter.

We can't throw the worst part of racism into the dustbin of history.

There were definitely a few ways I could have gone after 'Totally Biased' ended. One of those was getting a job at Starbucks.

I never wanted to be in the late-night talk show wars, and I think somehow with 'Totally Biased,' I got caught up in all that. Suddenly, there are articles about how we finally have a black voice in late-night.

I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.

If you say, 'I don't care if Muhammad Ali was a Muslim or not; he was just great,' what you're really saying is, 'I don't care about Muhammad Ali.' Same with Prince being black.

When 'Totally Biased' was canceled, I thought my career was over - but apparently it wasn't.

I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone.

The big thing I learned from Chris Rock was not to be a victim of show business. Don't let show business push you around.

If we're constantly giving every one of our allies the woke test instead of inviting them to be more woke, we're doomed. You can be the most woke person of all time and be alone.

We really suffer from a hot-take disease, wanting to be the first one who has the hottest take.

At worst, spring break in Daytona Beach feels feral - like everybody is trying to re-create scenes from the movie 'The Hangover.'

No state income tax, no snow, lots of golf courses, and ready-made gated communities make Florida an irresistible place for seniors - the ones who have the income level - to retire.

Usually, the news out of Florida makes me feel like being black in Florida can be a terminal condition.

In most major cities, you can find stores for urban homesteaders. They sell everything you need so that you won't need anything. Sort of a 'Take This Civilization and Shove It' starter kit.

To be off the grid is to be disconnected from most of America's infrastructure without having to cross any border.

The Right doesn't usually threaten to leave the country. When the Right feels threatened, it just declares it is going to invent a time machine to take the country back so that America can be 'great again.'

Capitalism doesn't care about sentimentality.

I like living in Berkeley, but I know Berkeley's not the world.

Stand-up comedians know how to walk into a room, even if you're not performing, just read the temperature of a room, and can easily sort of tell what's going on or what people are sort of feeling in the room, and it allows you to sort of approach people.

What has happened is we've allowed the people who run policies in this country to sort of make us pick Left and the Right as if those are the only two choices.

If you're on TV regularly, doing a thing regularly, whether you're Anthony Anderson on 'Black-ish' or Don Lemon, an hour a night, you have to turn into, 'What's the delivery system through which I can deliver information?' I don't mean they are being fake or that they are doing something that's disingenuous.

If I say 'political comedian,' then people think you're talking about you, the Senate and Congress, and what's going on in Washington D.C. If I say 'comedian,' people automatically assume that you're a comedian who talks about how his wife won't listen to him and that dummy down at the mechanic who wouldn't fix his car.

When I stand up in front of groups of people who agree with me, I know I have to really step my game up because I can't just sort of meet them where they're at; I have to take them somewhere else. They want you to challenge them and have good ideas.

You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.

As much as some people like to put down 'political correctness,' if it wasn't for political correctness, I wouldn't be free right now.

The country should be more inclusive, not less inclusive, and over an infinite timeline, it becomes more inclusive. It doesn't always happen at once.

We should always be having a conversation about if we could make this country more inclusive and what we can do to do that.

When things aren't going well for black people, they blame the government. When things aren't going well for white people, they can't blame the government because the government is supposed to be for them. So they blame black people.

People in Hollywood can condescend to the way a lot of other people are living.

The history of Oregon is partially the history of a state that legislated not wanting black people around.

No comedian grows up thinking, 'I hope one day to have a show on CNN.'

As a comedian, you see all parts of the country because you play there.

You don't get smarter by not learning stuff.

My agenda... is to learn about people.

This is a country that was founded on racism. It was built on racism. It still continues to thrive through wealth disparity, and housing disparity is all built on the backs of racism.

If I have any talent, I think I have an ability to listen to people and also just meet them on their level.

As a black man, I actually had naturally sort of comedic curiosity about the Klan.

I just want to make TV that I want to see.

That's how to make a stand-up comedian: You take a person who is uncomfortable and try to squirrel their way out of it through humor.

Throughout my career and my life, I talk a lot about racism in this country, and if you're going to talk about it, then you're going to eventually come to the chapter about the Klan.

I've always been a fan of these travel shows and documentary series.

Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I'm headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches - even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida.