By David Edward Clark
Dr. Bill Cosby sat center stage for nearly two hours and told stories that had Finney laughing gleefully. His jokes on Friday, April 30 centered on his childhood relationships with his parents, music, girls and words.
He started with his childhood, admitting, “It’s very difficult being a parent because you try to be nice to the child but they get confused—the child gets confused. They know your name is mom, they know your name is dad, but they really think you’re a servant.”
Unlike servants though, parents have “the look.” “My mother had a threat,” said Dr. Cosby, “it was not a complete sentence.” His father’s word, on the other hand, was “say.” “You would be misbehaving and ‘SAY!’ That was enough,” said Dr. Cosby, continuing, “You don’t want him to stand up; if he stands up, he’s not gonna waste it.”
Dr. Cosby’s first introduction to music was Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the like. After a thorough scat impression, he elaborated on the way they would dance to that music. “Everybody’s going crazy over break dancing. No, these people left the ground.”
From his chair, Dr. Cosby flung his feet around, threw up his arms and explained how men flung women all over the place, and they did everything without looking at the women they were dancing with or losing their hat. All of this took practice, the logistics of which baffled Dr. Cosby. “How do you practice in the projects I do not know, because your living room is half the size of this carpet,” he said motioning to the perhaps 10’x15’ carpet he was sitting on, “then there’s a hallway, then there’s a kitchen.”
Growing up completely broke, Dr. Cosby explained how he got himself into these dance halls for free. “I had no money and I did not sneak in per se.” One day at his high school, he found a music stand backstage and took it. When a dance was coming up, he would take his case. Knowing that the “thing starts at eight o’ clock, I would get there at six.” If questioned, he would motion to the case. “The musicians don’t know it; they think I work backstage, and the people backstage think I’m in the band.”
Throwing transitions to the wind, Dr. Cosby began to talk about the word “suck.” “’That sucks,’ ‘he sucks,’ ‘this course sucks,’ and I say stop it,” said Dr. Cosby. “Sucking is good.” His reason being? “Sucking saved your life. When you were born, the only think you knew, other than breathing and blinking”–the rest cut off by laughter and applause—but continuing, “if you don’t suck, you outta life.”
“The second thing is this,” was Dr. Cosby’s next transition. “As you get older and older and older, some things pop up into your mind too late…things that you could have said 30-40 years ago to somebody. They may even be dead now.” He gave the example of his 14-year-old daughter saying, “I didn’t ask to be born in this world.” His knee jerk answer was, “Well then die,” but he admitted that was not a good parental answer. “Four months ago, the answer came. She’s 45 years old, so I’m passing it on to those of you who don’t have an answer for that.”
The answer is, “Yes, you did. About nine months before you were born, I released about 60 million sperm cells. You were one of them and you started swimming with the rest of them. You could have stopped off and let the others pass you, but you swam with no instructions on where the egg was, and when you got there first, you slammed the door shut.”
Next, Dr. Cosby turned to a memory of being six years old and wanting a racing car that cost 15 cents and a cereal box top. “Now, my parents were not poor, they were broke, and I didn’t like them. I didn’t like either one of them because broke people are no fun…and not only were they broke for me, they went on and had two more children.”
Little Cosby had three levels of persuasion. The first was to ask for 15 cents nicely, to which his Father said, “Son, we don’t have it.” There existed a few voices in Little Cosby’s head, one of which said, “See, I told you.” Another said, “They got it, they just don’t want you to have nothing, that’s all.” So he took it to the second level: whining. When his father said again, “Son, we don’t have it,” the voices responded, “I don’t see how two grown people, in their middle 20s, both of them working, and they don’t have seven and a half cents apiece.” So he took it to the third level: mucous, to which he gained the same response.
In a brief interlude, Dr. Cosby skipped to tell a story about physical punishment back in the 1940s. A group of friends were playing ball when Edward West was at bat and his mother came out to say that dinner was ready. He asked to finish his batting, to which she asked if he thought she was cooking “for her health,” said Dr. Cosby. “Go on back in the house, [Edward said] I’ll be home when I’m ready.” After shooting a look, Dr. Cosby added, “We never saw Edward again.”
“Anyway, you don’t report your parents to anybody,” said Dr. Cosby getting to his point. “You don’t go to some old person and say, ‘My father hit me in the head,’ because that person would hit you.”
Returning to his racecar story, he knew his limits about talking back, but he could stomp. So he stomped up to his room and once there, “The voices said to me, ‘Slam the door!’ and I said ‘Yeah!’” After slamming the door, “The three voices said, ‘Now lock it!’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’” So he sat on his bed, hardly able to breath, “And I was just wishing that they would get so sick and they would be dying…and then they would be like, ‘Oh son, oh son, please, we’re dying please come and save us’ and I would say, ‘I don’t have it!’”
Well, his father came up the stairs “and said, ‘Junior? Junior.’ And the voices said, ‘Don’t answer.’” After trying the door, his father said his name one more time and told him to open the door. “Then my father knocked on the door one more time with his foot. BOOM! The bolt held, but the molding…” At this point, his father had a look on his face that Little Cosby had never even imagined and the voices left him. With his father standing over him, he had no idea what to say so he started to sing. “Jesus loves the little children.” His father, looking down on him said, “Junior, Ima tell you something, and I want you to remember this as long as you live. And then he knocked me out.”
Little Cosby awoke in his mother’s lap with an icepack on his head, his mother telling his father, “‘You shouldn’t do this,’ and my father said, ‘you’re the person who told me to go up there and kill him.’”
His next story concerned a childhood friend he called Poppy Whitehead. “Me and Poppy Whitehead had fun. We didn’t like girls,” said Dr. Cosby, prefacing the story. One day while he was playing at Poppy Whitehead’s house, his older brother had a girl over. Little Cosby and Poppy Whitehead watched as the two got closer together, “and then she opened her mouth and he opened his mouth and then we saw it,” said Dr. Cosby using his hands to show the two tongues making out. “It was the nastiest thing I have ever seen in my life. If a girl ever put her nasty tongue in my mouth I would punch her in the stomach real hard and she will have a baby. And Poppy Whitehead said, ‘Yeah man, you could get like polio from doing something like that.’”
The next story was about one birthday party when Little Cosby, now around 12 years old, played spin the bottle. This was after “something happened to me overnight. I had a dream and after that, I just liked girls,” said Dr. Cosby, who wished he had been warned about this dream. “Now, why wouldn’t my father tell me, ‘Son, sit down. Now, you’re gonna have a dream. Uh, there’s gonna be a woman in the dream, but she’s not gonna have a face and she’s not gonna have a body either, but you’ll know she’s there. You’re gonna have a good time. You’re gonna get a feeling like you’re gonna pee. Don’t pee.”
When it was his turn to kiss a girl, Little Cosby was very excited. When it happened, “Poppy Whitehead fell back laughing (hoo haaaa). ‘Punch her in the stomach real hard!’”
From there, Dr. Cosby went on to discuss sex. At one point, everyone got wallets, and in the wallet they kept a rubber. Eventually, a raised ring comes through the wallet, “So when you wanna prove to somebody that you’re gettin’ some–that’s what they called it, it’s called ‘some,’” Dr. Cosby mimed pulling out a wallet and holding it up. “Same rubber, eight years.”
Next was a story about a girl who was “fine,” as in hot, as Dr. Cosby described. She wasn’t going with anybody and one day she said she wanted a “plutonic” relationship. “I had no idea what this word means, so at the time I was happy,” said Dr. Cosby. When he went home, he asked his father, “‘Dad, what does the word ‘plutonic’ mean?’ ‘It means you ain’t gonna get none’ ‘But get none what?’ He said, ‘Good, then you won’t miss it.’”
When he was finished, Finney gladly gave him a well deserved standing ovation.
