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W. Kamau Bell

W. Kamau Bell had a nearly charmed rise from struggling stand-up comedian to buzzworthy comic to late night talk show host. His politically minded material crossed the high dudgeon and boundary testing of Mort Sahl or Dick Gregory with an up-to-the-minute 21st-century hipster calm, making his series "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell" (FX 2012-13 / FXX 2013) a refreshing alternative to the usual late night suspects. Walter Kamau Bell was born in Palo Alto, California; the only child of a single mother who worked in education and self-published books of quotations by prominent African-Americans, Bell moved around the country quite a bit in his childhood and teens, developing a fondness for stand-up comedy as a shy, introverted child. Settling down in Chicago to attend the arts school Columbia College, Bell began taking classes with the renowned Second City improv troupe, but his first love of stand-up prevailed. Resettling in the stand-up hotbed of San Francisco, Bell did the grinding routine of a struggling young comedian. The city's progressive politics also suited his temperament, and he embraced community activism on a variety of causes. This newfound personal emphasis on politics crept into Bell's stand-up act, so much so that in 2007 he rented a San Francisco theater to put on a nightly show entitled "The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism In About An Hour." The show was successful enough that he took it on tour, including a stint at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Festival. A mixture of topical humor and audience participation, the live show became the template for "Totally Biased" after Chris Rock saw it and invited Bell to turn it into a television series. With Rock as executive producer and their mutual friend Chuck Sklar as showrunner, "Totally Biased" premiered on FX to strong reviews and decent ratings in 2012. Originally a weekly series, it became a five-night-a-week program (running Sunday-Thursday instead of the more common Monday-Friday) in September 2013 when it moved to the comedy-centric start-up station FXX. Unfortunately, poor ratings for the revamped show caused FXX to announce its cancellation on November 13, 2013.