Comic W. Kamau Bell has spent much of his life feeling awkward. A self-described “tall, rangy black dude,” Bell was often mistaken for a basketball player growing up — except that serious asthma and allergies meant he spent the bulk of his childhood indoors watching TV.
He says, “There was this weird sense of guilt about the fact that I wasn’t using the physical shell that God had given me, and that I wasn’t taking advantage of my physical gifts.”
As an adult, he gravitated towards comedy, but he felt conflicted about the fact that he often didn’t fit in in black comedy clubs. “When white audiences didn’t think I was funny, I was like, Well they didn’t think I was funny; but when black audiences didn’t think I was funny, it hurt my soul,” Bell says.
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