A biography for W. Kamau Bellhasn’t been written yet.
“Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated.”
“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.”
“I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.”
“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.”
“There's a lot of power in laughter.”
“America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.”
“My agenda... is to learn about people.”
“Comedy can be very deep sometimes.”
“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 grew up in a household where we talked about race all the time, and that's sort of in me. So if I become the Anthony Bourdain of race and culture, then great!”
“The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.”
“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.”
“I only halfway paid attention in high school Spanish class, and it may be too late now to catch up, no matter how many levels of Rosetta Stone I order.”
“There's no religion in this country that is more misunderstood, mis-categorized, and misidentified than Islam.”
“The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports.”
“Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?”