“W. Kamau Bell is the most important guy doing comedy right now. Do yourself a favor and go see him. He’s got the most astute, hilarious and completely righteous material going and he’s going to be a legend in his own lifetime like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. Think Bill Hicks but slightly taller.” — Margaret Cho

W. KAMAU BELL told the very first joke about Barack Obama on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend waaaaaaaay back in 2005. Unfortunately, the joke predicted that Barack would never be President. (Oops!) Comedy Central later announced that Kamau had told the very first joke about Barack Obama. For this, Kamau was named on that network’s list of Best 100 Obama Moments. Comedy Central also invited Kamau to perform his critically acclaimed solo show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour, at their theater in Hollywood. “The Curve” enjoyed a long run in San Francisco, had continued success in Oakland and Berkeley, and played to full houses in 2009 at the New York International Fringe Festival. And this May “The Curve” will return to New York City as a featured part of TerraNova Collective’s 7th Annual SoloNova Festival. Time Out New York said, “Happily, Bell finds comic gold in the wide range of material he mines, offering provocative insights into an ugly reality. FOUR STARS” The San Francisco Weekly honored Kamau as the Comedian of the Year in 2008 and also profiled him in a cover story in 2009.

And that’s not everything. Kamau has appeared at the prestigious Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, where he was the only comedian to perform at both the New Faces Show and Best of The Uptown Comics. Kamau spent two years appearing regularly on radio station Live 105 as half of the movie review team Siskel & Negro. (Kamau is Negro.) The duo can still be heard online at their podcast at Roof Top Comedy. And in addition to Comedy Central, Kamau’s other TV appearances include Comics Unleashed, KQED’s Spark, ABC’s View From The Bay, and Filter on G4. But Kamau is most proud of co-founding The Solo Performance Workshop (2005), a school for emerging artists. As a writer, Kamau is featured in the book What Would Bill Hicks Say?

Kamau has been profiled in several different newspapers, including four seperate occasions in The San Francisco Chronicle — even once (not ironically) during Black History Month. The San Francisco Weekly called Kamau “smart, stylish, and very much in the mold of politically outspoken comedians like Dave Chappelle and Margaret Cho” — though he was more excited that they called him “handsome.”