Adam Mansbach & W. Kamau Bell
Go the F to Sleep author and United Shades of America host discuss humor, race, and social justice — two Bay Area voices with deep roots in American comedy.
Why we picked this
Mansbach and Bell have both built careers on using humor to get at things that straight argument can't — this conversation should surface how that actually works, and why comedy has become one of the more effective vehicles for talking about race.
Adam Mansbach wrote Go the F to Sleep, which became a cultural phenomenon for reasons that had little to do with children’s books: it was a comedy about parental exhaustion that hit a nerve with an entire generation of parents. Since then he’s continued writing fiction and nonfiction with a consistent interest in race, class, and American absurdity. W. Kamau Bell hosted United Shades of America on CNN for eight seasons, using travel journalism and standup instincts to document the full spectrum of American communities and beliefs.
Both have strong ties to the Bay Area and Brooklyn, and both have spent their careers navigating the specific challenge of making comedy about subjects that aren’t inherently funny. The conversation at Sydney Goldstein Theater will cover humor as a tool, the mechanics of talking about race in public, and the current state of social justice discourse, from two people who have been working these questions for a long time.
City Arts & Lectures has a format that suits this kind of pairing: enough time to go deep, an audience that shows up ready to engage, and a stage that doesn’t require the performance to be a performance.