'A very funny fellow': Bill Cosby has always been in it for the laughs

Throughout his career, Bill Cosby's appeal has been rooted in a
unique combination of affability and aloofness. He was the cool guy
you always wanted for a best friend but were content to appreciate
from afar.
But that was before Cosby's only son, Ennis, was murdered Jan.
16 in Los Angeles. With an instinct for his audience that is matched
by few in the entertainment business, the 59-year-old comedian
realized this was no time to play the jester.
And so, in the opening minutes of a performance earlier this
month in West Palm Beach, Fla., Cosby quietly spoke about Ennis'
death. Then, having given his fans permission to laugh - "I don't
mean to sound arrogant, but somebody had to give them a release," he
explained later - the laughs flowed as they always had.
Tonight Cosby will perform on stage again, at 8 p.m. in Bartle
Hall, as part of the annual fund-raiser for the Boys & Girls Clubs of
Greater Kansas City.
Even in tragedy, Cosby demonstrated his ability to speak to
Americans young and old, black and white, rich and poor. And from his
early years as cool guy to his present incarnation as media
statesman, he's rarely lost control of that gift.
"I think Bill's humor takes situations from real life and is
tapping into some of the unconscious things that go on with all of
us," said Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical psychiatrist at Harvard
Medical School and a longtime associate of Cosby's.
"He taps into the truth often. It seems we try to hide and
camouflage that we're behaving in certain ways, and when he pushes
those buttons in a humorous way, people really respond. The
audience feels it is with him."
'I came to entertain'
Along with Sidney Poitier - the first African-American to win the
Academy Award for best actor - Cosby was one of the top black
performers of the 1960s. But while Poitier was compelled to project a
"positive" black image, Cosby sidestepped issues of race. He was
just a funny guy who happened to be black.
In college dormitories across the country, white students who
might not have had one black classmate had a friend in Cosby. All
they had to do was put on one of his comedy albums, like
"Wonderfulness" or "Why Is There Air?"
On "I Spy," the television show that cemented Cosby's fame -
and won him three Emmys as best actor, another first for
African-Americans - he was originally supposed to play a role
subservient to his white co-star, Robert Culp. But the pilot episode
was rewritten so that the two men became equals. "In fact," Culp
said at the time, "I'm the dummy and he's the bright one, with a
college degree."
Cosby, characteristically, saw it another way: "We put in a
black man and white man in parts that were interchangeable. Culp
could play my part or I could play his."
To be sure, spies Alexander Scott (Cosby) and Kelly Robinson
(Culp) conveyed an integrationist message in the turbulent '60s. And
if Scott's romantic life was virtually nonexistent, he was also
intelligent and resourceful - and refreshingly free of the pop-eyed
buffoonery that had too often exemplified black manhood on movie and
TV screens.
Not that Cosby ever portrayed himself as an activist or crusader.
While performing at the University of Kansas in 1968, Cosby was told
that Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down. Yet he waited until
the end of each show to inform his audience of the news, telling
them, "You came here to laugh and forget; I came here to
entertain."
But his brand of entertainment had nothing to do with the sort of
politically charged comedy purveyed by another popular comic of the
time, Dick Gregory.
"Some people want to hear how he went to the back of the bus,"
Cosby once said of Gregory, "but if he really told the truth about
that, it wouldn't be that funny."
Over time he would support the anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa and underwrite black colleges. But Cosby always played the
peacemaker and set his sights on more modest goals than social
change. In 1966, during the first season of "I Spy," he told a
reporter, "Someday I want to do a family situation comedy on TV, and
it will be a hit because people want to see what goes on in a Negro
home today."
It would be nearly two decades before Cosby overcame formidable
odds to put that show on the air.
Cosby, educator
When "I Spy" signed off after three seasons, NBC and CBS
launched a bidding war for his services. As a CBS executive said
later, "We offered him the moon, but he said no; they offered him
the moon and the planet Mars. " Cosby's megastar deal, signed with
NBC in 1969, paid him $ 15 million over five years to do a series of
specials and "The Bill Cosby Show," in which he played a high
school gym teacher.
"You will see in this series people of all colors - and when I
say all colors I mean just that," he told The Kansas City Star in
1969. "It's not going to be a series that 'tells it like it is,'
whatever that means. The messages will be there but they will not be
hitting you in the face."
But in the summer of 1970 Cosby registered for graduate studies
at the University of Massachusetts and, when NBC declined to renew
the show after the 1970-71 season, he entered school full time. He
earned his master's degree in 1972.
Thus began a move away from the semi-mythical world of his comedy
records - sales of which had slowed since the 1960s - and into the
real world, where, through television, he hoped to affect the lives
of a generation of children.
His passion for teaching nearly inspired Cosby to quit show
business altogether and become a schoolteacher. His son, Ennis, whom
Cosby called "my hero," would finally realize that ambition a
quarter-century later.
Instead he made appearances on the PBS series "The Electric
Company" and created "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," the landmark
Saturday morning cartoon series that aired on CBS from 1972 to 1977.
Though based on characters from his comedy routines, "Fat Albert"
was far more earnest, seeking to teach kids community values.
He signed on as pitchman for Jell-O in 1973 and launched two more
short-lived series. One, "The New Bill Cosby Show" on CBS, was a
variety show that had the ill fortune of appearing opposite ABC's
Monday night football juggernaut; it lasted just one year. Then he
tried "Cos" (ABC) in 1976. It was a noble experiment, a one-hour
prime-time program aimed at 2- to 12-year-olds. It only lasted three
months.
His TV career on hold, Cosby finished his doctorate (also at
Massachusetts) in 1978. His thesis: "The Integration of the Visual
Media via 'Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids' into the Elementary
Schools, Culminating as a Teacher Aid to Achieve Increased
Learning."
And he turned to other ventures. Along with Poitier, he produced
a trilogy of comedies with all-black casts. The first was "Uptown
Saturday Night. " He did occasional stand-up and made a family movie
with Elliott Gould ("The Devil and Max Devlin"). He paid a record
price for a Thomas Hart Benton painting and invested in a group of
low-powered TV stations.
NBC: Nothin' but Cosby
In 1983 he pitched a nonviolent, family-oriented detective series
to two networks (the third, CBS, had already bought the pilot of a
show called "Murder, She Wrote"). He was turned down, and it was
then that Cosby made the fateful decision to finally sell his
original concept from 1966 to the networks. ABC said no, but NBC said
yes. "The Cosby Show" became an instant No. 1 hit, gave NBC a
beachhead on Thursday nights and propelled it to network domination.
Some 13 years later the Thursday prime-time lineup is still NBC's
money train.
Unlike previous sitcoms built around black actors, "The Cosby
Show" didn't portray a world of limited opportunities or thwarted
dreams. For a change, viewers got a look at the black middle class -
a strata of society whose existence television had rarely
acknowledged, much less in a comedy format.
Predictably, some critics - black and white - grumbled that the
Huxtable family wasn't "black" enough. But in depicting a black
family that deviated from stereotypes, "The Cosby Show" made a
political statement that was all the more powerful for its subtlety.
Poussaint reviewed every script during the show's eight-year run,
and also advised Cosby on his four best-selling books about family
life. (In the summer of 1986 Cosby's Fatherhood sold 2 million copies
in 19 weeks, a record at the time.)
"One of the things that was good about 'The Cosby Show' is it
helped parents smile and see the humor in what goes on in the family,
instead of always having to be something that is a stress or a
strain," said Poussaint.
"Cosby doesn't tell jokes. His comedy has a quality of
storytelling about children, his family, incidents, and actually many
of them are not totally made up. Many of them have actually occurred
in his own life, his own experience, which he then examines and
brings the humor out of them."
As a dispenser of life's lessons, Cosby is "very effective,"
Poussaint said. "There's a lot of wisdom in his humor and I think
people appreciate that. Truths about human existence and frailties
and life responsibilities."
A demanding donor
Cosby has supported education generously, including a $ 20 million
gift to Spelman College in Atlanta in 1988. Even his contributions to
the completion of Spike Lee's epic biographical film "Malcolm X" in
1992 can be seen less as a political move than an educational one.
But such support comes at a price, because Cosby expects plenty
from today's youth. When co-star Lisa Bonet left "The Cosby Show"
for her own spinoff, "A Different World," she developed a
reputation as a terror on the set. Cosby, who also produced that
show, called her a "prima donna" and she was gone after one season.
In 1990, meeting with 300 black students and guests in South
Bend, Ind., before delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame,
Cosby ridiculed a football player's grade-point average. "That's
nothing," he snapped, prompting an exchange in which the player
began crying and other students in the room angrily confronted Cosby.
Still, Cosby's primary concern as an entertainer, at least since
the "Fat Albert" days, has been promoting and producing television
that the whole family can watch. In late 1992 he even toyed publicly
- and all too briefly - with the notion of buying the NBC network
from General Electric.
And in an era when networks target their shows to lucrative
slices of the TV audience (say, 18-to-34-year-old female viewers),
disregarding most other viewers, Cosby still tries to do
old-fashioned broadcasting - reaching the largest and most diverse
audience possible.
He hasn't always succeeded. Two recent series, a syndicated
revival of the Groucho Marx quiz show "You Bet Your Life" and "The
Cosby Mysteries" on NBC, flopped. The longevity jury is still out on
"Cosby," his current Monday night sitcom, which has a two-season
commitment from CBS.
"I'm 59 going on 60, I've got things and demons that I've got to
fight," he said during a promotional tour for the show last summer.
"Can I make young people identify with me, with being married 32
years? Can I make 20-year-old people laugh along with 65-year-old
people?
"How do I do that? It's very, very tricky."