Latest KKK Blog - Stars Over Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has made me obsessed with stars. Not the famous kind. Although there are famous stars as part of the festival, Margaret Cho, Henry Rollins, Michael "That Dude From The Police Academy Movies Who Makes Crazy Sounds With His Mouth" Winslow, Al Murray The Pub Landlord. (He's super famous here.) I also don't mean the stars in the night time sky. Especially since it doesn't get dark until after 9pm ... which is awesome.

I'm talking the kind of stars reviewers give to shows. One thing I've learned in my first week at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is that it's all about stars! Preferably lots and lots of them, like a hotel in Dubai.

So many posters here -- I've never seen so many posters in all my life -- are littered with stars proving each show is the most awesomest of any show. I came up to the Fringe with no poster stars at all. All I had was a quote from some regional American publication. And my quote withers next to these...

TO READ THE ENTIRE BLOG CLICK HERE

Is I am or Is I Ain't Jimi Hendrix? - KKK Blog

​ In the back of my mind, I've always thought I could be Jimi Hendrix. I'm not saying I could be as good a guitar player. Nor am I saying that I would make as iconic a rockstar. My Afro could never compare to his. But I always thought I could do the thing where I went overseas to make my name and then come back A STAR! And people would ask me questions like, "How are you enjoying your first time in the States?" And I'd be like, "I'M FROM HERE BUT YOU DIDN'T GET ME SO I WENT TO WHERE I WAS WANTED!" This pretty much already happens whenever I go back to Chicago.

But that is exactly kinda what happened with Jimi Hendrix, and right now I am on a plane hoping it kinda exactly happens to me. I'm headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the original, biggest, and greatest fringe festival in the world. There are more than 2,500 shows and 1,300 premieres, more than 500 of which are X-rated. And guess what? Fringe audiences love --- and love to love --- comedy. They think it's as valuable a form of artistic expression as dance, music, or theater. Silly, huh? Many American comics have made their bones in Edinburgh: Rich Hall, Demetri Martin, Doug Stanhope ... others. And I'm hoping -- maybe even desperately and furtively praying -- that it will happen to me. TO READ MORE CLICK  HERE

Zees is Jimi in Sweden. Borgy borgy borgy!

KKK Blog - Pandora Launches Comedy Stations. I Find Out Who I'm Like

Pandora is doing comedy now!!! With Pandora doing comedy, we have almost created a Utopia on earth. We've got iPad 2s, electric cars being made by American car companies, and Cee-lo is on TV every week. No wonder the world is coming to an end on May 21. Humanity has got nothing left to do.

Full disclosure: I briefly worked at Pandora on this project, and I can't legally tell you exactly what I did there, but it was somewhere between the areas of "Hey, guys! Pandora should do comedy!" and "Ooooh, shiny!"

But I can tell you that I had very little to do with the space magic that makes this awesome. Comedy on Pandora works just like music on Pandora. You type in the name of your favorite comic or comedy track name, and Pandora creates a station based on the qualities it says define that comedian or track.

Since I have two CDs out (ONE NIGht ONLY and Face Full of Flour), as an experiment, I am going to enter, HORROR OF HORRORS, my own name. I'm going to listen to five tracks, and we're going to see what happens when I find out who I am like and why I am like them. Can you even create your own Pandora station based on your own name? Will that create a rip in the space-time continuum? Well, I'm doing it anyway. My only rule is no thumbing up or down. I just gotta take what I get.

Okay, apparently W. Kamau Bell is similar comedically to Mr. Paul Mooney, Godfrey, Aries Spears, Eddie Griffin, and Alonzo Bodden. One out of five ain't bad. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Nothing against the dudes on that list, I guess I was just hoping to find I was similar to Mr. Paul Mooney, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, young Malcolm X, and the unreleased Bill Cosby CD that he recorded a couple of years ago when he went on that tour chastising single moms.

1. Artist -- W. Kamau Bell, Track Name -- "Where's Chicago? & Californ-YO!"

This is a track from my first CD which was really just a bootleg that I recorded and released as a CD. These two jokes were a STAPLE of my act. It's a bit like looking at baby pictures of myself, except the pictures talk and for some reason I thought the word "titties" was funny.

When I ask Pandora why it played this track, it says, "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features hostile comedy, subject explorations, a sarcastic delivery, location/situation jokes, and satirical observations." Yeah, that's me. Except recently I've taken out the "location/situation" parts of my jokes so I can focus more on the "hostile comedy" parts.

TO READ THE REST OF MY KKK BLOG POST AT THE SF WEEKLY CLICK HERE.

Latest KKK Blog - Hannibal Buress Is All Anyone in This Town Can Talk About...

OK, look assholes! I have a hot tip for you. This is hotter than a tip on Apple Computer stock in 1990. Hotter than an iPad 2.* Hotter than fresh-out-of-the-oven chicken potpie filling. HOT! Hannibal Buress is headlining for the first time THIS WEEKEND at the Punch Line here in San Francisco!

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Kamal, you recommend comics every week. I get it. He's a friend of yours and you think he's funny. Enough with the hard sell."

Okay. First of all, my name is Kamau, not Kamal.

And second of all, this is not the usual KKK endorsement, THIS is a warning of things to come. A warning of the inevitability of how stupid you will feel in a year or two** when Hannibal is one of the biggest comics in the country and you missed your chance because you didn't heed this warning to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.***

Hannibal has already been feted by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Variety. He's working on getting his late night talk show card fully punched, and is one of the few comics who each year who manage to crack the inscrutable code of appearing on David Letterman. He has written for SNL and 30 Rock. His 2010 debut comedy CD, My Name Is Hannibal, was lavished with praise, making multiple 10 ten lists, including ones by iTunes and Punchline Magazine.**** He's appeared on the podcasts WTF with Marc Maron and The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture with guitarist Vernon Reid from the band Living Colour.

READ THE REST of my SF Weekly blog HERE!

SFWeekly.com: Why Comics Love Recording in San Francisco

Comics love to record their CDs and DVDs in San Francisco. They LOOOOOOOVE it! Even if they don't live here. Even if they didn't come up doing comedy here. Even if they don't spend that much time in the bay. They still love to record those permanent records known as "specials" here. And they even used to love to record them here when those permanent records were actually records.

Here is a quick list off the top of my Googler of notable CDs, DVDs, and albums that were recorded in San Francisco:

1. Paul Mooney's Race - 1993 (The San Francisco Punch Line)2. Steve Martin's Comedy Is Not Pretty - 1979, and Let's Get Small - 1977 (both at The Boarding House in San Francisco)

3. Margaret Cho's I'm The One That I Want (The Warfield -- this reset the bar for the modern special.)

4. Lenny Bruce's Live At The Curran Theater - 1961 (Apparently the actual show was --- GULP! --- THREE HOURS AND SEVEN MINUTES LONG!)

5. Mort Sahl at The Hungry i - 1960 (Yup, before it was a seedy strip club it was home to the best comedy the country has ever seen.)

6. Zach Galifinakis' Live at The Purple Onion - 2007 (You can hear our very own Alex Koll* introduce Zach at the beginning of the DVD.)

7. Sandra Bernhard's I'm Still Here... Damn It! - 1998 (Slim's)

8. Bill Burr's Let It Go - 2010 (The Fillmore)

9. Phyllis Diller's Live in San Francisco - 2001**

10. Kevin Avery's Hardcore 2007 (The San Francisco Punch Line)

11. Daniel Tosh's Happy Thoughts - 2011 (Yerba Buena Center)

12. Eddie Izzard's Dress To Kill - 1998 (Stage Door Theatre, I was in the flippin' audience the night it was recorded for HBO. I didn't get it. I do now.) FOR THE REST OF THIS POST GO HERE!

Listen my FULL interview on Forum! #GreatestInterviewEver

This was the best radio interview I've ever done. Mostly because it was an hour focused all on ME! Dave Iverson, the host, asked probing and intelligent and thoughtful questions... which is certainly not always the case for radio. Afterward, I met all the black people at KQED... three. (Just kidding... I met three but I saw five.) It was a lot of fun... the second half many people called in and they were all cool. Enjoy. And I understand if you don't have enough interest to take the whole hour of KAMAU! It was like Frost/Nixon... but less jowl-ly and confrontational.

W. Kamau Bell

Fri, Dec 17, 2010 -- 10:00

Download audio (MP3)

San Francisco-based comic W. Kamau Bell is known for telling the very first joke about President Obama on Comedy Central, when he memorably predicted in 2005 that Obama was not going to win the election. Bell joins us in the studio for a conversation on humor, and race.

Bell has been named best San Francisco comedian by 7x7 Magazine, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. His new comedy album "Face Full of Flour" made the iTunes list of best comedy albums of 2010 -- and he's performing at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco on New Year's Eve.

Host: Dave Iverson

Guests:

• W. Kamau Bell, San Francisco-based comic

LATM Founder is SF Weekly's Best Comedian 2010!!!

This is 3 years in a row that The SF Weekly has gotten it right!. Nato this year, Ali Wong last year, and some black dude the year before that. Extreme congratulations to Nato! Of course I have a steak in this one. Nato is the co-founder of Laughter Against The Machine. We'll be kicking out the comedic jams this summer in Seattle and Portland. You've been warned.

Best Comedian - 2010

Nato Green

http://www.natogreen.com

Nato Green is a hard-working man in show business. (We can't really say the hardest-working man in show business, in a town so packed with hard-working men in show business.) His Iron Comic series blends improv-style audience participation with traditional stand-up, his work at the Progressive Reading Series kept the writers doubled over, and his Laughing Liberally Local 415 and the New Jew Revue are legendary. He's also a blogger for the Huffington Post, where he recently contributed an Onion-style fiction about a group calling the Tea Party "not conservative enough." The takeaway quote comes from a woman too afraid of Jews to give her name: "I voted for Sarah Palin, but I don't believe a woman's place is to kill a moose. We should leave that to the menfolk." But it is for a single night's work that we honor Green at the moment: Laughter Against the Machine. The show returns this summer, with Green's cohort of W. Kamau Bell, Hari Kondabolu, and, hopefully, Janine Brito, too, reprising the funniest comedy show we've ever seen. The funniest. In a town packed with funny shows.