DURING TIMES as fraught as these, the general public (that’s you and me) grasps for voices of reason, authority, and levity, or some perfect combination of the three. And often, the voices we seek out belong to comedians who touch on sociopolitical issues in their stand-up or writing. So when the news coming out of Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York started piling up on the shoulders of the African American community, people started leaning on someone like W. Kamau Bell to say… something.
“I can get caught up in it,” Bell says, with a knowing laugh. “When I hear myself saying to my wife, ‘I need to tweet about this! People need to know!’ that’s when I know I’ve gone to crazy land. But when those two police officers were killed in New York, I very actively didn’t tweet about it because I didn’t know what to say. I felt this pressure to comment, though, so I said, ‘If you want my thoughts on this, follow [poet and rapper] Saul Williams.’ He has all my thoughts before I do.”