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

PRAISE FOR

THE AWKWARD THOUGHTS OF W. KAMAU BELL

Bell . . . tackles everything from racism to his life growing up as a Blerd (Black nerd) to his struggles to find his comedic voice in this illuminating memoir.

—Entertainment Weekly

"At turns sarcastic, poetic, and enraged, Bell’s language is potent. His own realization of how racism intersects with other forms of discrimination, like sexism, broadens his platform and embraces a wide audience. Awkward Thoughts is definitely entertaining, but it also invites readers to look through different eyes. And those who aren’t inspired to take action will at least have considered a new view. As Bell says, ‘That’s progress.’"

—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"At times funny, at times somber, this debut will be enjoyed by fans of United Shades, Issa Rae’s TV series Insecure, and anyone who enjoys comedy with a personal touch."

—Library Journal

A funny, heartfelt tête-à-tête with a down-to-earth star.

—Boston Magazine

With insight and aplomb, stand-up comedian Bell recounts his career arc. . . . Those unfamiliar with Bell’s work or expecting a lighthearted read from a popular comedian will be surprised by the book’s breadth and depth. . . . This informative read will be illuminating and worthwhile for aspiring comedians and general readers.

—Publishers Weekly

A comprehensive look at what gave rise to Bell’s insightful, critical eye and his hilarious comedy.

—Booklist 

A unique perspective of the development of identity comedy in the twenty-first century.

—Kirkus Reviews

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Bell, W. Kamau, author.

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 / W. Kamau Bell.

Description: New York : Dutton, 2017. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016059246 (print) | LCCN 2017016810 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985892 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985878 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101985885 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Bell, W. Kamau. | Comedians—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

Classification: LCC PN2287.B414 (ebook) | LCC PN2287.B414 A3 2017 (print) | DDC 792.7/6028092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059246

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

Version_3

This book is for Sami and Juno . . . because pretty much everything I do is for Sami and Juno.

CONTENTS

Praise for The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

My Awkward Youth

Awkward Thoughts about Superheroes and Doc McStuffins

CHAPTER 2

My Awkward Blackness

Awkward Thoughts about Sports

CHAPTER 3

My Awkward Start in Stand-Up Comedy

Awkward Thoughts about Denzel Washington

CHAPTER 4

My Awkward Middle in Stand-Up Comedy

Awkward Thoughts about Creed

CHAPTER 5

My Awkward Sexism

Awkward Thoughts about Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall in America

CHAPTER 6

My Awkward Love of a White Woman

Awkward Thoughts about White Guys

CHAPTER 7

My Awkwardly Awesome Parenting Skills

Awkward Thoughts about 11/9

CHAPTER 8

My Awkward Failure as a Late-Night Talk Show Host

Awkward Thoughts about the Democratic Party

CHAPTER 9

My Awkward Joking Around with the KKK

Awkward Thoughts about Missing President Obama

CHAPTER 10

My Most Awkward Birthday Ever

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Hello, reader.

Before you start reading, I have a question: Why are you reading this particular book?

Do you have a dead spot in the pit of your stomach that has been there for months and isn’t going away? Are you kind of afraid that it never will? Are you feeling stuck? Trying to figure out your next move? Questioning everything that you held dear and wondering how you could have been so wrong about what everybody else in this country was holding dear? Are you unsure of how you are going to continue dealing with the level of hate in the world and, worse, the level of hate you have to deal with when you want to talk about the level of hate in the world? (Just me??)

Let’s talk about the racism that we all deal with every day!

"You would want to talk about the racism, YOU RACIST!"

Wait, what?

[Expletive.] [N-word.] [Thinly veiled death threat.] . . .

Are you (like me) hoping that the recent events in American history will kick-start the 1960s all over again? Or are you secretly happy that all of this happened because your life is pretty much golden and you were hoping for things to get more interesting because TV hasn’t really been interesting since the final episode of Mad Men? . . . Or was it Breaking Bad? No . . . it was definitely The Sopranos . . . unless it was The Wire . . . Yes! TV hasn’t been good since the last episode of The Wire. Ahhhh, doesn’t it feel good to be distracted again?

Wait . . . Is that why you’re reading this book? Is it serving as a distraction until the new season of Game of Thrones (or Luke Cage or Insecure or Empire or Veep) begins? OH MY GOD, VEEP IS SO GOOD! Julia Louis-Dreyfus is on the Mount Rushmore of comedy!

If it’s a distraction you want, you might be in the wrong place. I like getting distracted, but I can’t seem to turn away from everything that is happening right now. It feels like things are slipping away. It feels like just showing up isn’t enough. It feels like the day before the beginning of one of the Mad Max movies. Maybe that is the distraction we need. I want to see what exactly happened the day BEFORE the world turned into a post-apocalyptic desert and people began paying thirty bucks for an ounce of water. I want to see a just-pre-post-apocalyptic film. Like the eve of the post-apocalypse. Maybe that will help us make sense of things. What happened that night? I’m betting those people didn’t know it was the night before the apocalypse. I bet they were just sitting around saying something like, Wow! I never expected that candidate to win the presidency! . . . Oh well! We’ll get through this! Like we always do!

Cut to the next day and a bald-headed Charlize Theron is driving a car across a barren wasteland for ninety minutes. Because, eventually . . . You. Don’t. Get. Through. It.

That’s what happened in that movie, right? I never actually saw it. I prefer my post-apocalyptic movies to be more like The Book of Eli, because you literally . . . Can’t. Go. Wrong. With. Denzel. Washington.

Are you reading this book because you feel like this may just be the just-pre-post-apocalypse? Like maybe we are currently living through the sequel to the fall of the Roman Empire? (Makes sense. We love sequels.) Are you reading this because this is just about the end and this book seems like a good read to end the world with?

Well, I don’t know that I have any answers for the end of the world. And any distraction I have to offer comes in the form of awkward tales from my past. (Like the time when I was a kid and I wore fur-lined leather boots, which I LOVED, to elementary school, only to learn later that I was made fun of all day because they were girls’ boots. My first window into the idea that gender is a continuum . . . like flavors of chocolate. Milk chocolate, YES! Dark chocolate . . . Well, I guess. Just this once.) But I’m sitting here writing this book as a way to grapple with some of the questions that this crazy, upside-down time has produced, both in me and in the world.

Maybe that is why you are here? To watch someone grapple with some questions? Perhaps you have heard me do just that on my podcast Politically Re-Active. Or are you one of the small but mighty who still feels like my yearlong FX (and later FXX, and after that FXX-ed) show, Totally Biased, was 1. groundbreaking and 2. canceled too soon. (Hint: 1. Could be. Who am I to say? 2. Definitely not.) Maybe you were shocked by how my seemingly ridiculous fanboy podcast Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period has turned from a weekly examination about the underrated greatness of Denzel Washington into a larger discussion about representation in Hollywood? Maybe you have seen my CNN show, United Shades of America, and you’re wondering how crazy I must be to have gone and asked questions of the Ku Klux Klan? Maybe you’ve seen me wrestle with racism onstage as a comedian, online in blogs, in print, or (at some of my lowest moments) with Internet trolls. Maybe you’ve appreciated seeing my struggle to articulate (my word, not yours, so I can call myself articulate) how I feel and what I think.

Or . . .

Are you reading this because you just don’t think I’m funny at all? Not even one bit? (Have I never made you laugh? Or even smile? Not even one time? What are you doing here?) Maybe you think I’m just some sort of affirmative action hire sent to make guilty white liberals feel better about themselves so that even though they don’t have any Black friends, they can tell their white friends, But my favorite comedian is J. Jamocha Fudge . . . I mean, W. Kamal Brown . . . I mean, that guy who looks like Questlove but isn’t him . . . At least I don’t think it’s him. That makes sense.

(By the way, I spell Black with a capital B because I subscribe to all the Black intellectuals and academics and barbershop sages who say that Blackness is as much an uppercase identity as Chinese-ness or Christianity-ness or any other proper-noun identity is. And if Wikipedia is going to insist on capitalizing Klansman, then I am certainly going to insist on capitalizing Black. No matter what every editor of everything I write tells me—except for the editor of this book. Thanks, Jill.)

Or are you here for the same reasons I am? Have we gotten here, to this page, together because in the past few months it feels like the United States of America has turned upside down and we have to review some of what’s happened in order to think through what comes next? Are you thinking (perhaps awkwardly) that you need help sorting through the stuff that makes up America in order to attempt to figure out how we should remake America? And have you seen or heard enough of my work that you know I’m awkwardly thinking the same? And often thinking it out loud? And what’s more awkward than having to permanently commit my awkward thoughts to the page for all time, or at least until the current administration takes us firmly into the apocalypse, where there is no electricity for your smart devices and all actual books are used as firewood to heat the underground caves that we all call home?

If that’s why you’re here . . . welcome to my awkward thoughts.

CHAPTER 1

My Awkward Youth

My mom is Janet Cheatham Bell, and she is awesome. Seriously awesome. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my mom. She is empirically the greatest mom of all time period. Everybody likes her. Everybody wants to be her friend. Everybody wants her approval. Everybody wants her to think that they are cool. I have friends who let me know when she likes their posts on Facebook. And these aren’t my emotionally needy friends. These are my kick-ass, activist, artist, take-no-prisoners-and-free-ALL-political-prisoners friends. And they turn all gooey when my eighty-year-old mom likes their status update that quotes James Baldwin’s prescient criticism of modern-day conservatism. And if she comments on their post . . . fuggedaboutit! I’ve seen less enthusiasm from those people who get brand-new homes on that show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or from that dude on Maury who moonwalked when he found out that he was not . . . the . . . father.

My mom is a race warrior and educator in the true senses of the words. My dad is Walter A. Bell. And, weirdly, he is also everything my mom is: popular, charismatic, loved and admired by all who know him. But they took it two different directions. To paraphrase Malcolm X—and who doesn’t like paraphrasing Malcolm X whenever you can?—my mom is a field negro. My dad is a negro in the house . . . which is different from a house negro. My dad is a field negro who worked his way into the house, bought the house, and turned the slave quarters into a wine cellar. And he didn’t lose any (or not much of) the field in the process. Both my parents seem regal. They both turn heads when they walk into rooms. But where my mom feels like a Matrix-style oracle, my dad seems . . . well . . . famous. People stare at him even if they don’t know him. Part of it is because my dad is tall, like for reals tall. I’m six foot four, which is like regular tall, but my dad is six foot six, which is like actual-for-reals NBA tall. My dad is also really good-looking. (There was a point in his life when he was regularly getting mistaken for Dr. J., aka NBA legend Julius Erving—if you’re not nasty.) And I’ve known all my life that my dad is better-looking than me. Like, a lot better-looking. I know it sounds weird to think of an eight-year-old looking at his dad like, Damn, that dude is good-looking! But it’s true. He is good-looking, and on some level, even as a child I was jealous. My dad was a semiprofessional photographer, turned management trainee, turned insurance salesman, turned chairman of the board of a Fortune 500 company. And other than both being Black, my parents have only two things in common:

Me

They are both hustlers in the best possible way.

As I said, my mom is an outside hustler. She has been self-employed since the mid-’80s. Back around 1984, she left her job as a textbook editor in Boston and moved us to Chicago. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington as mayor, and she said she wanted to be in a city that was run by a Black person. Chicago was about to go through a golden age. Because 1984 was also the year Michael Jordan was drafted to the Chicago Bulls, and it was the year that a former news anchor named Oprah Winfrey took over a half-hour talk show called A.M. Chicago and decided to try to give Phil Donahue a run for his money. Phil Donahue hasn’t been seen since.

Once my mom got us to Chicago, she set to work self-publishing a book called Famous Black Quotations. It was a compendium of African-American quotes, at a time when that did not exist. And my mom was already with the tiny-tech revolution, because she made sure the book could easily fit into your pocket. Now there are many books of African-American quotations, and really, who needs a book? You can just Google inspirational quotes by Oprah from this morning and be all set. But back when my mom was self-publishing books, it was a major task. She had to collect the quotes on her floppy disk. She had to take those quotes to a typesetter to get the book laid out. Then she needed to take all that to a graphic designer to make the book look good. (And yes, I mean she had to take this stuff. There was no e-mail.) Then she had to find a printer that would do a short run of books since she wasn’t ordering a million copies. And then, once the book was done, she spent lots of time in her car hand-selling them to individual bookstores (many of which were Black owned). And now in the year 2017, everything I described can be done with Microsoft Word and Amazon.com. But back then, it took serious work.

But my dad is an inside hustler. He’s got that Kevin Hart "While you’re sleeping I’m doing sit-ups, Instagramming, having a meeting about Ride Along 3, 4, and 5, and I’m on my way to do nineteen sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden" thing. That’s my dad, but replace sit-ups with leisurely treadmilling, Instagramming with monitoring his investments online, movie pitches with actuarial charts, and Madison Square Garden with nineteen meetings in various corporate boardrooms around the country and occasionally the halls of government in Bermuda. (Yup. Bermuda.)

I am an only child, and the youngest grandchild on both sides of my family by a mile, so I was always the baby. My mom was thirty-five when she had me. And in 1973 that was like one of those stories you read today about a sixty-five-year-old woman giving birth. My mom’s brothers and sister had gone what was then the traditional route of getting married out of high school and immediately having kids. And her oldest brother went the also popular route of having a kid in high school and not telling anybody so there could be a surprise forty or so years later.

And since both my mom and dad come from big families, there were always lots of cousins around. And when the cousins would gather, I was always on the outside because I was the youngest. I ended up feeling like a mascot and not quite like one of them. But I didn’t always hate it. I just knew that no matter how entertaining they found my trailing behind them, at some point they would be like, OK. See ya! And then I would be left to my own devices. My device of choice was television. Still is today.

I was also the youngest because my mom put me in school a year earlier than she should have. She said I was bored at home at five, so she just decided to put me in first grade. Apparently you could do that back then. It’s not like now. If I wanted to get my two-year-old daughter, Juno, into the three-year-olds’ class at her preschool, me and my wife, Melissa, would have to submit a birth certificate, blood samples, fingernail clippings, and a recent stool sample. Kinda like what President Obama went through to stop the current Birther in Chief from taking his job away.

I’m sorry, Mr. Bell. According to our tests, your daughter is only two and three-eighths, not quite old enough for you to have the privilege of having her nap here instead of at home with you.

So for the first half of my life, being the youngest was a big part of my identity. Everybody else hit those age markers way (or what seemed like waaaaaaaaay) before me: work permit, driver’s license, voting age, drinking age, losing-their-virginity age. OK, that last one wasn’t a fault of my youngness, but it certainly felt like it at the time.

(I was twenty-one. It was to a jazz singer. Not a woman who liked to sing jazz but an actual professional jazz singer. And it was amazingly . . . awkward. I was all knees, elbows, and technique-less, like a turtle darting in and out of its shell trying to not get hit by the rain. If I ever see her again, I’d immediately apologize. Also, I hope I never see her again.)

Conventional wisdom says that the youngest kid has the least amount of pressure on them. But in another way I wasn’t the youngest, because I was also the only. Now, in an effort to not totally lose my stepsister from the audience of this book and thus the coveted stepsister demographic, I should say I am the only biological child of my dad. Although by the time Ashley and her mom, Loresa, came into my life, only child was such a huuuge part of my identity that I wasn’t interested in newcomers. I was six. Already stubborn. Already King of the Grudge Holders. Already stuck in my head and imagination. Plenty happy with the TV, comic books, action figures, paper and pencil. I was never lonely. Never bored. And minus action figures, those things pretty much still define my happy place, although I’ve replaced comic books with actual books for the most part.

Wait. Why am I lying? I’ve replaced comic books with multiple browser windows open to articles about how the world is getting worse as each minute goes by, mixed in with whatever my current, purposefully distracting YouTube videos of choice are. (Recently it has been Dr. Pimple Popper—aka Dr. Sandra Lee, if you like nasty videos of pimples being popped. Many of the articles never get read, but ALL the videos get watched . . . sometimes more than once. But be careful, grasshopper. Dr. Lee ain’t for the faint of heart.)

My parents have always had high expectations for me for vastly different reasons. For my mom, I think it had something to do with how hard it was to actually have me, and again how late in her life that it happened.

My mom was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was born in 1937, which meant she was around for separate drinking fountains for Blacks and whites, Whites Only signs, Black people being forced to sit in the balcony at the movie theater, Black people being forced to sit at the back of the bus (as opposed to when I was a kid and choosing to sit there), and everything else that came with those realities. My mom was around during the time when the word colored was said by white people who were trying to be nice.

My mom has all the classic American Black folk stories. Her dad was an elementary school dropout and yet always worked three jobs at a time in order to help support his wife and four kids. My mom’s mom was a teacher and an aspiring writer who devoted her life to the church. As a kid my mom loved to read and was good at it. But when schools were integrated when she went to high school, they put her in remedial English because she wasn’t reading at the level of the white students her age. They. Thought. She. Had. A. Learning. Disability (except I’m sure they didn’t say it that politically correctly). In reality, my mom did not have a learning disability. What she had was a syndrome called Years of being educated at Black public schools that didn’t have the greater resources of white public schools because of racism-itis. Heard of that syndrome? Turns out this country still has it. But because my mom didn’t play the Believe whatever people tell you game—especially when those people were white people in Indiana in the first half of the twentieth century—in a short period of time, my mom went from remedial English to regular white-people English and then to proving to herself that she was at least as smart as anybody in that damn school.

This was a time when people got married right out of high school and had babies right away. But my mom didn’t do that. When she first got married, she was only twenty-three but already considered an old maid. (I’m pretty sure old maid was the term they used before people felt comfortable saying the word lesbian.) At that age she had gotten married to a man—who isn’t my father. (Thank you, Black Jesus!) And they had a son named Paul who was born sick and died as a baby. That marriage ended shortly thereafter. Then later she got married to a white Jewish man whose name, when it rarely comes up, serves exclusively as the punch line of jokes about male insecurity and male chauvinism. My mom swears up and down that when this man was introduced to a new woman, he would pinch her breast as a way of saying, Nice to a meet ya! What in the name of Mad Men was he doing? I have no idea. Fortunately, this marriage also only lasted briefly. They didn’t have any kids. And from the way my mom tells the story, they didn’t even try to have any kids. (Again, thank you, Black Jesus!) It doesn’t sound like she even enjoyed the rehearsal process of trying to have any kids. When I ask her why she married him at all, she sort of always seems to frame it like it was a way to get out of her parents’ house and ultimately out of her hometown of Indianapolis. What’s wrong with Indianapolis? you ask. Well, it is alternately referred to as India-no-place and Naptown. Yup, Naptown. That’s the nickname Indianapolis gave itself! New York is the city that never sleeps. And Indianapolis is the city that gets sleepy around three p.m. and has to shut it down.

So by the time my mom was pregnant with me, she was thirty-five, unmarried, and twice divorced. That may not sound like a big deal (or any kind of deal) now. In fact, now we’ve kind of flipped the whole thing. These days it can seem weird if a woman is pregnant in her twenties. MTV has based a whole genre of programming around the weirdness of a young woman having a kid at the age that women have historically always had children: 16 and Pregnant. Ummm, you mean like all of our great-great-great-great-grandmothers?

But in 1973, my mom was a pioneer (which she often is in her life). In 1973, women didn’t just have kids, for the first time, at thirty-five years old . . . with no husband no less(!) . . . unless a lot of bad shit had happened to them leading up to that point. But there’s no way my mom would have defined herself as the victim of two divorces or as an unwed mother. Naaaaah. She was single. She had a relationship with the child’s father (my dad); she would have been happy if their relationship had worked out, but she wasn’t depending on him to help make this kid’s life happen. These were her choices. And she was making them. Her choices weren’t making her. She was a pioneer. My mom basically invented the idea of a woman waiting until she was ready before she became a mom. You’re welcome, Madonna, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Geena Davis, and Sandra Bullock.

And now, whenever my mom gets to talking about the subject of my birth, she will often tell the story of how she had to assure the people at the ob-gyn’s office that she actually did want to keep the child, and that she really wasn’t interested in an abortion. And when my mom tells this story, it is not a cautionary tale or some sort of anecdote about a woman’s right to choose. My mom is definitely pro-choice (as am I), and she laughs when she tells this story. I think in her mind she thinks the doctors were actually asking her, You really want to keep this kid? . . . REEEALLY? But you’re single, Black, AND female? Really, you want to keep this child? But what will you possibly do with him once he’s born and there’s no man around to put food on the table? And you’re so oooooooooooold? You’re more like a grandmother than a mom. . . . Oh my God! And I almost forgot to mention that you’re Black? Is the father Black too? JESUS H. CHRIST! So there’s like a 100 percent chance that your baby will be Black too! You know what, ma’am? . . . Why don’t you take another brochure explaining the benefits of not giving birth to fatherless future criminals.

Now, there are two things I take from that story. One, I have known it all my life. My mom has told it to me—and in front of me—as far back as I can remember. Which means I was probably (definitely) too young to hear it the first time. But that’s how my mom was. She was raising someone to be her equal, so she treated me and talked to me like I understood everything. Which pretty much guaranteed I was always trying to. Although when you think about it, what is the societally acceptable age for a child hearing the doctors kept wanting me to abort you story?

The second thing I take from all of this is that my mom is very funny and has a very stark sense of humor. Not a specifically dark sense of humor, but a stark sense of humor. She likes it when jokes cut through and clarify. She’s a big fan of jokes that aren’t a traditional setup and punch line. She likes jokes that are just statements that make you go, DAAAAAAAAAAAMN! My mom’s favorite Chris Rock joke is: A man is as faithful as his options. Damn.

That tells you a lot about her relationship history, and a lot about how she is using that joke to cut through some obvious pain. But if you hear my mom repeat that line, she will laugh like she’s never heard it before, and like she didn’t just say it. As if she was hearing Chris Rock say it again for the first time. And my mom knows how to laugh. It is a big, mouth-agape, cacophonous explosion. It is the laugh that makes people turn around and wonder if everything is OK, even though it is very definitely a laugh. People turn around, even if they are also laughing at the same thing that she is. When I’m onstage, I can hear that laugh above hundreds of other laughs in a crowded club. But my favorite version of her laugh comes when nobody else (or nearly nobody else) in the club finds what I just said particularly funny, and my mom doesn’t care or doesn’t notice that they didn’t laugh, and she laughs anyway. It is a kind of laugh that I associate with Black women over the age of fifty. A laugh that says, "I made it this far. I’ve fought