As someone deeply interested in comedy, all the stories about Bill Cosby lately has had me thinking. Apologies in advance if this seems a bit rambling.... See, I grew up listening to Bill Cosbys first comedy album. Thats significant, in that my parents had about a hundred albums between the two of them. And there were two black people visible in all that vinyl--Cosby, and Jimi Hendrix. (Dad mightve been a bigot, but he knew good guitar playing.) Now, I grew up listening to that album while watching *Fat Albert*, back in its original run. I think that show was part of what got me, at an early age, to think differently about race and not just accept my fathers racist opinions at face value. That, I must warn, is as much silver lining as you may find in what else I have to say. Bill Cosby was able to position himself alongside a generation of hip, suit-wearing young men who managed to transform mainstream comedy from vaudeville to a television-ready format. That generation included Bob Newhart. It included Lenny Bruce, initially, before Lenny started pissing off censors and police alike. It included Jonathan Winters, who comes off at first glance as weird but cuddly, until you dig into his old, privately-traded tapes and realize what a racist homophobe he was. It included Brother Dave Gardner, who started joking about white-on-black violence at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and using the KKK as personal bodyguards. It was a massively eclectic group, but in the end, TV homogenized them, and the ones that managed to keep careers were pretty bland. Bland, and cis, and straight, and with few exceptions, white. Professionals, not too different from Dick Van Dykes TV character. That includes Bill Cosby, albeit nearly a generation later. Thats how you made it back then. You started out in the clubs, then you got an appearance on Jack Paar, then you got a record contract, and if you played your cards right, you might land a TV show and maybe even a movie appearance. Not that different from how comedians work, except they were the pioneers, and they had a much more restrictive environment in which to work. But that restrictiveness gave them a pallor of respectability. And I wonder how many of them were respectable--what allegations or recordings of Bob Newharts have yet to surface.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:38:49 +0000
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