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Bell and a reporter moved to Union Square, laptop in tow, to take advantage of the weather. He opened a Word document with a list of jokes neatly outlined. He has just begun to work another joke into the rotation, and he isn't completely comfortable with it. Every premise — in this case, it's "Now that I'm married, I only want to hang out with lesbians" — needs to get tested. Sometimes testing a joke can take years, with constant revision, sometimes in the middle of a set.
True to form, Bell doesn't bury the lede. "I can't be friends with straight women anymore," he begins. "Every straight woman that I've ever been friends with inevitably ends up treating me like I'm their boyfriend. It's always some phone call out of nowhere." He affects a woman's voice. "Kamau, what's going on with us? We need to talk about our relationship." He continues in his own voice. "No, we don't. We don't have a relationship. We're friends. Friends don't need to talk. They either talk or they don't. We never need to talk. I only need to talk to one person at a time in my life."
He pauses before segueing into the next section. "And straight men are too competitive. And it's not just sports. Everything is a competition. I was talking to one of my best friends, Kevin, and I was telling him a story ... 'I was on my way here, and this dude that I passed on the street gave me a weird look.' And Kevin was like, 'I would have kicked his ass.' Really, Kevin? Really, you would have kicked his ass? Even though you've never kicked anyone's ass, ever? No one has ever seen you kick anyone's ass. There is no record of you kicking anyone's ass. Look — and this is a message to every straight guy out there — just because you own the Bourne Identity movies on DVD ... and you've watched all the bonus footage ... That doesn't make you ready to throw down!"
Reading over his jokes, Bell quickly points out a problem: He's objectifying lesbians and lumping together and skewering other groups of people based on their sexuality, which is not usually how his humor operates. But he claims it's coming from an affectionate place.
The third joke was giving him the most trouble. "My gay male friends are always so busy, there's so much going on. If they weren't going on an AIDS walk, it's a rave, and then the next day, you have to wake up early to get brunch," he says, again summarizing what's on the screen before breaking into a pedagogical tone.
"See, what I'm trying to do is take a stereotypical image, which I don't like, and make it funnier, and also put the image of gay men in a positive light. I'm not making a joke about gay men hitting on me." But Bell shakes his head over the next line, a few words implying that all that gay male activity leads to a coke habit. Most of his act rests on his ability to point out the hypocrisy of modern racism. It just won't work if he brings in sexist or homophobic fare.
As we discuss this, a derelict-looking black man approaches us, proffering flowers and a garbled song. Bell reaches into his pocket and produces some change. Scanning the clumps of people enjoying the rare warm night, Bell suddenly looks weary. "That guy and I are probably the only black people here," he says, gesturing around Union Square. "For them, now, 50 percent of the black people they see in San Francisco are like a homeless, off-key member of the Temptations."
It was an attempt at humor, but neither of us was laughing. The incident served as a reminder of one of the principal ironies of life in San Francisco, one Bell frequently references onstage — it's a liberal city with one of the lowest African-American populations (around 6.5 percent, as of 2005) of any major city in the country.
When Bell moved to Oakland in 1997, his comedy had improved, technically, from the Chicago days, but he still had trouble finding his own voice. "I sounded like a lot of other comics," he says. His friend, Ghetto Gourmet underground restaurant founder Jeremy Townsend, echoes this. "His act was flat, in a shallow sense — you could only dig so deep," Townsend says.
Bell was often on the brink of quitting altogether, even when things were going well. Unsurprisingly, he found the weeks and months following 9/11 a hard time to do comedy that involved race, so he stepped back from that subject. He started directing solo shows around San Francisco and teaching solo performance classes.
In 2005, Bell performed at the Montreal Comedy Festival and appeared on Comedy Central's Premium Blend TV showcase. "You meet a lot of people who tell you that you're going to be famous," he says of his time at Montreal. "Then I came back and I wasn't famous." His increased visibility, though, led to gigs opening for Dave Chappelle in Chicago and Detroit.
By late spring 2007, Bell reached an impasse — in Okinawa, Japan, of all places. He was booked to play shows over seven nights for U.S. troops — an audience who, Bell says, was uncommonly bored. "It was like performing at a frat house where the keg is dry," he quips. "I'm not blaming them, but my allegedly intelligent sociopolitical fare went nowhere. It was 45 minutes of nothing."
He shivers in the heat, remembering the horror of the silent crowd. The next day, he felt like "dead man walking," and the fact that he managed to do a little better the next couple of nights barely mattered. He wasn't having fun. "And if you're not having fun, there's no point."
