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The Punch Line's green room is indeed satisfyingly green, its mint walls covered with framed photos of comedians who have graced the stage. The ventilation, though, leaves something to be desired. Comics come and go, some scratching notes in the back of the room, others trading barbs near the door, everyone sweating up a storm.
Bell arrives at around 8:30 p.m. and takes a seat at the desk. As the closing comic, he has more than an hour to kill before his time. He takes a few weathered pieces of paper from his pockets — set lists from his last week headlining the club, filled with cryptic titles like "Walter," "Black House," Throw Some Flour," and "My Asian Fetish," and places them in front of him. He then rips a piece of paper in half and begins copying, pausing to consider and reconsider the order.
Onstage, a comedian is making fat jokes. The crowd laughs, but generally seems listless. The heat is having a bad effect on the club's atmosphere. Even nonsmokers are taking refuge outside for fresh air.
Bell pulls out his laptop to refresh his memory of new material. After murmuring to himself, he brings up Boyle, his still-unwritten joke subject. "I can't stop watching her, man," he tells comedian Greg Edmonds, slouched in the chair next to him, who nods in agreement. A spirited discussion of Boyle's looks and potential makeover follows. "It's so fucked up — can't she just look like a human?" Edmonds asks.
The emcee, Moshe Kasher, popped in and out throughout the night. About 20 minutes before Bell was to go on, Kasher issues a warning. "The crowd's turning," he says, pointing at the next comedian on the bill. "He's got his work cut out for him."
After Okinawa, Bell went to work on a different sort of act: an hour-long solo performance project. He found his inspiration in a Rolling Stone story titled "Shirley Q. Liquor, After Imus: A Black Face Comic Who Sings '12 Days of Kwanzaa,'" which questioned whether redneck comic Shirley Q. Liquor in blackface constituted racism. "I don't know in what context a man in a clown wig and blackface wouldn't be considered racist," Bell says, disgusted.
Bell's one-man show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve, didn't find an audience immediately, but Bell's long-suppressed desire to write longer-form jokes, or maybe just stories that weren't jokes at all, paid off in critical local acclaim. Longtime friends and colleagues may have heard him deliver similar material in the past, but never so personally or so pointedly. "His anger doesn't take up as much space, and that makes his performance stronger," the show's director, Martha Rynberg, says. "He uses his anger in certain places, so that it's an ingredient more than the main course."
Bell Curve consumed Bell's attention for much of 2008 — well, that, and planning his wedding to longtime girlfriend Melissa Hudson, a white UC Riverside graduate student who is frequently, if carefully, mentioned in his act. But now he's ready to say yes to any project that will extend his reach beyond local fame.
By the time Bell jumped onstage on Sunday, the heat had subdued the remaining crowd to the point of catatonia. A burly, tattooed man sat in front, looking drugged. Conor Kellicutt, the white comedian preceding Bell, had taken a few stabs at race jokes and gotten pretty much nowhere; his crack about Oprah being fat again was met with silence. Kasher's introduction of Bell, a comedian providing "insight," didn't seem to excite the masses either.
But Bell takes the beaten-down audience in stride. "We live in crazy times," he says, grabbing the mike stand, "crazy times. We have a black president ... Pirates of the Caribbean is real. Gay people can get married in Iowa, but not San Francisco. The biggest player in the NBA is Chinese. Crazy times."
Mild chuckles. Bell segues into a joke about Obama not acting presidential enough. "He just makes it look too easy. Maybe he's like LeBron, and the transition into the pros is seamless, but come on! Sweat a little!" he exhorts, throwing his hands up.
Bell's physicality as a performer has grown over the past few years: he sits, he stands, he power-walks, he dances. The crowd seems to appreciate the effort.
When he launches into his bit on lesbians being his preferred company, a murmur spreads among the crowd. "No, no, not like that," Bell quickly corrects, "It's just that with my straight female friends, I'd always get that weird phone call, to talk about our relationship. And I only need to have that conversation with one person — the person I'm fucking." He's tweaking the language, making it a bit bawdier for the comedy club crowd.
He coasts through the section on competitive straight males and is met with approval in his description of gay male friendships. Bell has built a part into the joke where he describes reality show Project: Runway marathons as another too-busy aspect of gay life, and then drops in insider info — "Chloe should have won; she had a better line in Season Two, but then she choked at the end" — to ensure no one thinks he's somehow too straight to enjoy the show.
By this point, the crowd is won over. "The best thing about lesbian friends is that you turn to them and say, 'Women are crazy,' and they go, 'Yup. And pass the hummus,'" Bell says, slowing down to get the full effect from the punch line. It got big laughs, helped along by his wry delivery. But one figure has been absent from the set: Susan Boyle. He tried to work her into his opener — the "world is crazy" lead-in — but muffed it. Her name was jumbled up in the longer list, and while he paused for a second, perhaps intending to ad lib something, nothing happened.
