W. Kamau Bell making TV projects that make people think

Berkeley comic W. Kamau Bell hasn’t been doing a lot of TV since his ground- and genre-breaking talk show “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell” was canceled by FXX. Other than hosting a couple of shows for Showtime from South by Southwest, he admits he was in a kind of “stumbly, bumbly what’s-going-on-with-my-career” place after he and his wife and two kids moved back to Berkeley. “And I was like, thaaaat’s great, but can it not just be white places?” he recalls by phone from Philadelphia, where he has a standup gig for a college audience that night. If viewers feel a bit of tension as KKK members talk about the “mud races” and say it’s an abomination for an African American man to be married to a white woman (as Bell is), he says he didn’t feel threatened at all. “Once I sat down and talked to them, I felt they were very misguided rather than very scary after a while,” he says, and that includes attending a cross lighting (as it’s officially called, not a cross burning). Meeting KKK members, some in their traditional robes and hoods and others in everyday attire, gave Bell some insight into why the Klan still exists after all these years. Future episodes will find Bell going to Daytona Beach, Fla., to talk both to spring-breakers and retirees, visiting Alaska’s Point Barrow and hanging out with cops in Camden, N.J. Bell will return to San Quentin to screen the episode for the inmates the day before the show airs. In the city of laid-back hipsters that can make Berkeley look like Bayonne, Bell looks at the effects of gentrification on the black community. Instead of sandal-shod hipsters drinking herbal tea, Bell finds “sad and angry black people” who have been uprooted from their homes and are wondering, “What did you do to my neighborhood.” The CNN series showcases Bell’s finely honed ability to tackle hot-button issues with smiling, disarming directness, something his standup audiences have learned to appreciate — and laugh at — over the years. No matter how funny he is, though, he never loses sight of real issues, and the current presidential “circus” is providing him with a lot of material for standup. “The stuff I do on college campuses is multimedia, so I just play a clip of Donald Trump and point at it,” he says.