Posted on 05/25/2004 10:30:56 AM PDT by dead
I never got Fat Albert. Dumb Donald wore a lampshade for a hat, Russell dressed like a bag lady, and Bucky appeared to be the victim of a back-alley orthodontist. Bill Cosby's distorted, funny-looking kids couldn't shoot fire from their hands, and they wouldn't know a weather dominator from a flux capacitor. Instead, they were a dumb and dumpy bunch who conquered the travails of life (deodorant? candy overload?) with one simple weapon—Fat Albert's formidable moral center.
I thought about that moral center last week, when Cosby ventured down to Washington and ripped into the have-nots among us. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, and the Coz had been invited to Chocolate City by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP proper, and Howard University. The triumvirate had decided to honor Cosby for having "advanced the promise of Brown." Cosby decided to do some advancing of his own.
The comedian launched into a relentless attack on poor and working-class African Americans, criticizing them for everything from what they name their kids to how they speak. "Ladies and gentlemen, the lower-economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he told the audience, in remarks later quoted by gossip columnists. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for their kids—$500 sneakers for what?"
And then: "They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't?' 'Where you is?' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"
Ouch.
Cosby has said his words were taken out of context, which is tough to prove since officials at Howard won't release a video of the event. News organizations around the nation have been asking for a copy.
According to one eyewitness, Coz lampooned blacks for giving their kids weird names like Ali and Shaniqua and finished up by launching a parting barrage at the prisoners rights movement. "These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola," the press reported. "People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"
Cosby's audience was reportedly shocked by the classist diatribe. They shouldn't have been. Throughout his career, Bill Cosby has been many beautiful things—brilliant humorist, anti-apartheid activist, champion of historically black colleges, to name a few. But over the past couple of decades, he's played one ugly role that his activist friends like to ignore—patron saint of black elitists.
Let's not act like Cosby's points are baseless. Here in New York, black activists rail against the evils of Giulianism, but shrink from confronting crack dealers. That said, Cosby's critique betrays his own narcissism—like the dandies who worship him, he fancies himself an everyman, but he's embarrassed by everymen. He's been a tireless critic of fellow black comedians, many of whom—for better and worse—chose to follow in Richard Pryor's footsteps instead of his. At last year's Emmys, Wanda Sykes asked Cosby what accounted for his success and that of other early black comics. Cosby, clearly annoyed with the demonstrative Sykes, fixed her with an ice-grill and said, "We spoke English."
Broken English is an obsession of Cosby's. In 1997, he wrote a mocking editorial for The Wall Street Journal denouncing the Oakland School Board for teaching Ebonics. "In London, I guess Cockney would be the equivalent of Ebonics," wrote Cosby. "And though they may study Cockney at Oxford as part of literature, I doubt they teach it." The fact was, the Oakland School Board never planned to "teach" Ebonics. They actually planned to teach proper English to young kids using Ebonics. But facts were irrelevant to Cosby because whenever he walked into a cocktail party and a stuffed shirt made a joke about Ebonics, his self-image crumpled from the hit.
In the '80s, Cosby's elitism was relatively benign, a punchline in an Eddie Murphy joke. But amid his most significant and entertaining work, The Cosby Show, there was always a touch of bourgeois fantasy. The marriage of a black doctor and a black lawyer was blatantly calculated to send a message. You could almost see the algebra etched on Heathcliff's forehead (Negroid MD + Negroid JD - Cousin on Smack = Good PR for Jack-and-Jillers).
There were no toilets in the Huxtable home, and the family repped for everything the elite liked to think it was. In reality, that elite enjoyed a frightening proximity to the rest of us. But The Cosby Show, at its root, was fighting racist propaganda with race-conscious propaganda. We'd survived Good Times, so the face-lift Cosby offered was welcome. But it was still Cosby doing the surgery. Which explains why, during the show's heyday, in the midst of Reaganomics, with black-on-black crime surging, with the crack epidemic wreaking havoc, with New York (where the show was based) in racial hysteria, Theo never so much as had his pockets run.
The show's obsession with keeping up appearances was not only a product of its creator, but of its creator's generation. It's no mistake that black America's biggest awards show is the NAACP Image Awards. Ditto for the Coz's recent diatribe. The civil rights crowd has had a rough 30 years as the old tactics of marching and boycotting have come up lame. Its leaders, like Cosby himself, are in winter, and having beaten Bull Connerism, they now stand befuddled and silenced before their greatest new adversary—class.
Race still matters, but largely the problems of black people today are the problems of poor people. In his last days, Martin Luther King turned his attention to class, a focus Cosby's brethren airbrushed away. They could march on Washington every 10 years without having to march on their own drug-riddled corners. They ignore the ghetto or, when emboldened like Cosby, shit on it.
When the Coz came to Constitution Hall last week, he was one up on his audience. He had no solutions, and unlike his audience, he knew it. And so he fell back on what elitists do best—impose condescending lessons on ethics and etiquette. He fell back on Fat Albert, and a world where poverty can be beaten through sheer force of blithe axiom. Morality becomes the answer when you don't have another one. Maybe we are everything the racists say we are—dumb, fat, and cute, in a really ugly and childish sort of way. But if we could just pay attention in school, stop stealing, learn proper English, and correctly apply deodorant, we'd be all right. Well, maybe not all right, but at least we wouldn't make Cosby look so bad.
COMPLETE AUDIO of the EVENT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/metro/052304-1s.htm
I defy you to find a single person on FR who's made more obscure, inane pop cultural references on this website in the space of a little under three weeks.
Good luck!
NyQuille----obviously conceived after dosing the wife with some heavy-duty cough medicine.
113 - "Black humor has always been crass, politically-incorrect, and filled with profanity and sex. "
"Explain Sinbad, then. "
I used to admire Sinbad, until I found out he had two totally different personas, and his 'white' persona was definitely not his 'normal' persona.
A few years back, he had a late nite TV show (replacing Arsenio Hall and a number of others in the same spot). It lasted locally for about 2 months before they yanked him. It was amazing. He had a mostly black audience, and not only was he VERY "crass, politically-incorrect, and filled with profanity and sex. ", he added advocating lying, cheating, theft, kite-ing checks, skipping out on rent, stealing, hiding your car from the repo man, and all kinds of other bad things, skipping out on payments for children (both legitimate and illigitimate), cheating on wives and girlfriends.
I was astounded, it was really bad and pathetic, and his studio audience loved it. However, locally, it raised tempers, and massive call ins to the TV station which pulled it well short of their 'contract', and they replaced it with reruns of something else.
You're right about the commentator -- if blacks can become doctors and lawyers --- and I should think the leftists would think they should be --- how is it a bourgeois fantasy that a black doctor would marry a black lawyer? People often do marry within their same education level. I think the show was pretty realistic of the way black professional families live. At least the ones I've known.
I think they should do what they want --- however other groups have done much more to "help" their own group. You will certainly see Mexicans shunning non-Mexican businesses, and I've seen ethnic groups support one of their own, you see them hiring their own but you can't really accuse blacks of doing that too much. Sometimes I think they should do it what the others do --- for example in some neighborhoods, they have been angry at the Korean immigrants who own the stores and who definitely have an inclination to hire only other Korean immigrants --- but you'll see the blacks shopping there -- even though they face discrimination.
I think his show ran a bit longer on the New York affiliates, but I'm not positive.
To be honest, I don't remember much about his monologues, except for a joke about illegal immigration that was moderately amusing.
If by 'white' persona, you mean the incredibly lame, not especially funny comedian who starred in such gut-busters as "Jingle All The Way", than I beg to differ.
Sinbad was great when he starred on "A Different World" and hosted "Showtime at the Apollo." He also had a great set when he was a stand-up comedian.
However, I'd say the past decade or so has not been too friendly to the man, at least as far as commercial success goes. Unless someone can provide evidence to the contrary, I'd say that the career of Sinbad-at least in mainstream comedy-is just about finished.
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I would imagine she had everyone's gum in her hair on the school bus.
Good lord, has someone told the Black Spokespeople like Jessie that in order to be "black", a comedian has to refer to immoral and irresponsible? This means that in order to actually conquer the problems that apparently beset their political base, they should be prompting the black churches to condemn immoral behavior, push for self-control and personal responsibility, and work to attack the real shortcomings of their own culture, rather than constantly assuming that every trouble they face is the result of oppression from without by Da Man! This could be hugh! Why isn't this being reported!!!!
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Bill has it right, and the people who are supposed "friends to the black community" will do what they have done for fifty years...blame the Other Guys, and line their own pockets while the black family takes the damage.
If the best are white males, that's the way we go. I was thinking, actually, of a particular calibration service we use, where all employees are black males. We don't hire them for "affirmative action", we hire them because they are outstanding at what they do.
Bump for a righteous post.
Cosby stepped up and has always stepped up. People forget he broke color lines that had been built with steel when he became the first black man to star in a television show. Hard to imagine, but it caused a lot of tumult at the time. Even Robert Culp was patted on the back for allowing Cosby to co-star with him.
Cosby's humor was always clean and edifying; he never swore and was consistently hilarious. Long before Seinfeld, he was the best.
My favorite old bit of his was when his brother and he jumped on their bed and broke it, then blamed the damage on "the man who came in the window."
Cosby's only son's death was tragic and very peculiar.
Blacks and whites all need to pay this man respect. If not him, who?
Hey. I just wanted to thank you guys for posting my articles here. Given that we come from different positions on of the issues, feedback here is especially interesting. It's always good to know what people are thinking, especially if they don't agree with you. Who knows, I might be wrong. Anyway, thanks for the postings, thanks for being so vocal in your responses, and please, read on.
What?!
Black America really thought that talking like ghetto trash and wasting money on pimp gear was OK?
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