What's so funny about Bill Cosby?
Grand Rapids Press, October 16, 2000

It’s standard practice to hoist giant TV screens on either side of the stage when a speaker or singer comes to a large auditorium. Rarely do they play as important a role as they did last night in the Grand Valley State Fieldhouse, as Bill Cosby appeared for a show on Homecoming Weekend.

Cosby has one of the funniest faces in entertainment history – capturing and magnifying emotions ranging from glee to frustration to an hilarious degree. Last night, with the fieldhouse floor and bleachers packed, the show depended on having Cosby’s face projected bigger than life onto the huge screens as he displayed the facial repertoire that has earned him his place in history as a legendary entertainer.

From the minute Cosby took the stage wearing a Grand Valley sweatsuit and cap, he had the audience in the palm of his hand. Initially, Cosby went without a script, depending on interplay with the audience. He called for students to come up and sing their alma mater, ridiculing them with his trademark deadpan as they botched it. 

“What are the school colors?” Cosby asked. “Black, white and blue? Those are all colors of bruised people.”

Cosby then slid off the stage and strolled into the audience, a venue that clearly energized him. He struck up a conversation with two freshmen about the perils of going to college, a la his famous “Kids Say the Darndest Things” CBS series. He chided the students for their contempt for math and their reluctance to do homework. “Did you buy all those books just to make the professors rich?” The interchange even produced a Cosby hallmark. When the talk turned to food, Cosby had a suggestion for them: “Jello, thank you,” he said, as the audience erupted.

Still standing in the middle of the fieldhouse, Cosby launched into a sketch of himself as a boy begging his parents for a cereal box toy. Etching the desperation of a six-year-old into the familiar creases of his face, Cosby outlined the three steps of child persuasion - asking, whining, and crying. Cosby said his confrontations with his parents ended with him storming to his room and slamming the door. “Then my father came and knocked on my door - with his foot.”

Cosby made his way back to the stage and began his routine about raising four daughters – “I used to build traps for them” – and the toll this takes on marriage: “Every time one of them hits 15, you have a different wife.” Barking out his complaints in the gruff manner that endeared national TV audiences to Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” he lamented how 
underappreciated fathers are to their families. “Why else would you get such horrendous Father’s Day presents? Where would you get the idea I would like soap on a rope?”

The fatherhood routine treated the audience to the finest of Cosby’s work. These confrontations with his daughters and his wife about grades and punishments were the bread and butter of the landmark “The Cosby Show” when it ruled the 1980’s. They also led him to write a book, Fatherhood, to host “Kids Say The Darndest Things,” and later to revive his sitcom as “Cosby” on CBS, with Phylicia Rashad again costarring as his wife. On the Grand Valley stage, the painfully blunt, constantly wise, sometimes-cranky Cliff Huxtable was back. 

So was another highlight of Cosby’s career. Joking that he needed his special influence to get his daughter into a good college, he said he had to prove to the admissions counselor over the phone who he was. “I said, ‘Hey, Hey, Hey!’” Cosby said as he switched to his distinctive throaty Fat Albert voice. It brought the house down.

The fatherhood routine gave way to another well-known sketch – graduation. One of the most sought-after commencement speakers in the nation, Cosby has special insight into the ceremonies. He quipped that there are those who graduate magna cum laude and others who graduate “thank you lordy.” A pre-med, pre-law student is “going to become a lawyer to protect himself.” Cosby mimicked a stuffy speech by a college president: “’You have challenged us. We have challenged you. We win.’”

Cosby closed the show with his dentist chair routine. It starts “with the dentist pulling out a needle this long,” Cosby said, holding his hands apart, “to deaden the pain! And then they want to talk to you.” The audience, laughing easily after nearly two hours of his droll delivery, was in stitches as Cosby mimicked a patient trying to converse with dentist tools in his mouth, his face in its famous contortions.

The humor is still strong in the 63-year-old Cosby, though his post- “Cosby Show” years have been marked by personal pain. In 1997 his son Ennis was murdered on a Los Angeles freeway after a failed robbery attempt. Around the same time, Cosby went to court with an extortionist who told tabloids she was his illegitimate daughter. This past spring, the CBS “Cosby” series was not renewed after four seasons.

Still, as the Grand Valley show illustrated, Cosby remains at the top of his game. His “Kids Say The Darndest” series re-emerges periodically, and he helped fill in for David Letterman during the late night host’s recent heart surgery. As much as Bill Cosby jokes about getting old, his humor has us feeling forever young.

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