Following in the footsteps of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, American comedian W. Kamau Bell is finding fans through edgy comedy that explores race relations.

A veteran of the San Francisco stand-up scene, Bell is also a newly minted TV comedian. His weekly FX Network show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell riffs on social, political and race-related issues and has been widely embraced by critics.

Rock became a fan after catching Bell's act onstage in 2010 and is now executive producers of Totally Biased.

"There's so much more involved in the TV show. It's like riding six horses at once," the New York-based Bell told Q's Jian Ghomeshi during a stop in Toronto for the JFL42 comedy festival.

"In stand up, it's riding one horse... and I’m more fluent with that. But there's work on the TV show that's some stuff I'm the most proud of in my entire career."

Though Totally Biased mines hot-button topics like the New York police department's "stop and frisk" practice, Bell shied away from describing himself as an activist comedian.

"Some people have put that label on me of 'activism,' but I really feel like that detracts from activists — you know, that's a job. I just find I like to do comedy about things I care about."

There's a world of comedians today doing jokes about innocuous topics like yoga pants — and Bell admits to having "written those kinds of jokes" — but he says he tends to write and perform about subjects that interest him.

"There's a lot of great jokes out there about yoga pants and I don’t want to put down the yoga-pant comedians," he said, laughing. "But I do feel like, personally, the comedy I respond to the best... is about the things I actually really have a stake in."

Bell talks to Q about how meeting Rock led to his new TV show, what effect Barack Obama's presidency has had on his comedy career and why he wants to avoid being pigeonholed as a black comedian.