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Latest KKK Blog - Stars Over Edinburgh

frisky.jpgThe Edinburgh Fringe Festival has made me obsessed with stars. Not the famous kind. Although there are famous stars as part of the festival, Margaret Cho, Henry Rollins, Michael "That Dude From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes Crazy Sounds With His Mouth" Winslow, Al Murray The Pub Landlord. (He's super famous here.) I also don't mean the stars in the night time sky. Especially since it doesn't get dark until after 9pm ... which is awesome.

I'm talking the kind of stars reviewers give to shows. One thing I've learned in my first week at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is that it's all about stars! Preferably lots and lots of them, like a hotel in Dubai.

So many posters here -- I've never seen so many posters in all my life -- are littered with stars proving each show is the most awesomest of any show. I came up to the Fringe with no poster stars at all. All I had was a quote from some regional American publication. And my quote withers next to these...

TO READ THE ENTIRE BLOG CLICK HERE

KKK Blog - Pandora Launches Comedy Stations. I Find Out Who I'm Like

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Pandora is doing comedy now!!! With Pandora doing comedy, we have almost created a Utopia on earth. We've got iPad 2s, electric cars being made by American car companies, and Cee-lo is on TV every week. No wonder the world is coming to an end on May 21. Humanity has got nothing left to do.

Full disclosure: I briefly worked at Pandora on this project, and I can't legally tell you exactly what I did there, but it was somewhere between the areas of "Hey, guys! Pandora should do comedy!" and "Ooooh, shiny!"

But I can tell you that I had very little to do with the space magic that makes this awesome. Comedy on Pandora works just like music on Pandora. You type in the name of your favorite comic or comedy track name, and Pandora creates a station based on the qualities it says define that comedian or track.

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Since I have two CDs out (ONE NIGht ONLY and Face Full of Flour), as an experiment, I am going to enter, HORROR OF HORRORS, my own name. I'm going to listen to five tracks, and we're going to see what happens when I find out who I am like and why I am like them. Can you even create your own Pandora station based on your own name? Will that create a rip in the space-time continuum? Well, I'm doing it anyway. My only rule is no thumbing up or down. I just gotta take what I get.

Okay, apparently W. Kamau Bell is similar comedically to Mr. Paul Mooney, Godfrey, Aries Spears, Eddie Griffin, and Alonzo Bodden. One out of five ain't bad. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Nothing against the dudes on that list, I guess I was just hoping to find I was similar to Mr. Paul Mooney, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, young Malcolm X, and the unreleased Bill Cosby CD that he recorded a couple of years ago when he went on that tour chastising single moms.

1. Artist -- W. Kamau Bell, Track Name -- "Where's Chicago? & Californ-YO!"

This is a track from my first CD which was really just a bootleg that I recorded and released as a CD. These two jokes were a STAPLE of my act. It's a bit like looking at baby pictures of myself, except the pictures talk and for some reason I thought the word "titties" was funny.

When I ask Pandora why it played this track, it says, "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features hostile comedy, subject explorations, a sarcastic delivery, location/situation jokes, and satirical observations." Yeah, that's me. Except recently I've taken out the "location/situation" parts of my jokes so I can focus more on the "hostile comedy" parts.

TO READ THE REST OF MY KKK BLOG POST AT THE SF WEEKLY CLICK HERE.

Latest KKK Blog - Hannibal Buress Is All Anyone in This Town Can Talk About...

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OK, look assholes! I have a hot tip for you. This is hotter than a tip on Apple Computer stock in 1990. Hotter than an iPad 2.* Hotter than fresh-out-of-the-oven chicken potpie filling. HOT! Hannibal Buress is headlining for the first time THIS WEEKEND at the Punch Line here in San Francisco!

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Now, I know what you're thinking. "Kamal, you recommend comics every week. I get it. He's a friend of yours and you think he's funny. Enough with the hard sell."

Okay. First of all, my name is Kamau, not Kamal.

And second of all, this is not the usual KKK endorsement, THIS is a warning of things to come. A warning of the inevitability of how stupid you will feel in a year or two** when Hannibal is one of the biggest comics in the country and you missed your chance because you didn't heed this warning to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.***

Hannibal has already been feted by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Variety. He's working on getting his late night talk show card fully punched, and is one of the few comics who each year who manage to crack the inscrutable code of appearing on David Letterman. He has written for SNL and 30 Rock. His 2010 debut comedy CD, My Name Is Hannibal, was lavished with praise, making multiple 10 ten lists, including ones by iTunes and Punchline Magazine.**** He's appeared on the podcasts WTF with Marc Maron and The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture with guitarist Vernon Reid from the band Living Colour.

READ THE REST of my SF Weekly blog HERE!