Last night I found myself watching a Bill Cosby standup routine from 1982 on a friend’s couch. I haven’t seen Cosby do anything for years, and this was shocking. It wasn’t funny.
It was funny when my brothers and I were kids. Then we grew up and adopted an appreciation for the cynical, no doubt enhanced by our awareness that the world presses on without the resolution of major social issues. And we’ve reveled ever since in darker humor that embraces stereotypes, politicians, and all things timely that better illustrate the world around us. (Of course, it’s easy to find the humor in it all when you grew up with the suburban cushion separating you from the issues.)
Something felt very wrong watching Cosby labor through impressions of stumbling drunkards and tripping addicts, only to lambaste them for participating in a lifestyle that “America’s Dad” just can’t come to grips with. I cringed when he invoked God and God’s sense of humor in the parenting shtick. I’d seen some of these bits growing up, as well as his shows and sitcom, even listened to my folks laugh at his “Mom’s the real boss of the house” ideology. But most of what I understand about Bill Cosby came from reading Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinlanguage when I was 11 years old, in which he payed homage to his idol by recalling the childhood sublime of laughing hysterically to Bill Cosby tapes in his father’s truck.
None of this registered at all last night, and then it all clicked: Cosby has been wildly popular over the years only because he speaks in classist terms and propagates a particular socioeconomic agenda. It’s actually kind of sickening to watch him tell middle-income, God-fearing families exactly what they want to hear; that parenting and raising families is tough (“I’ve seen the boss’ job and I don’t want it!”) but that it’s all worth it in the end, per God’s sense of humor. Admittedly, the drunk routines were still funny, but like the Charlton Heston/Cecile B. DeMille and screwball bible movies of the 1950s, he couldn’t put forth such promiscuous behavior in his routine without calling it just that, without ascribing justice to those who committed the sin. And that’s why drunks are funny in his act, the same reason why audiences accepted those scenes of men running around chaotically on Mount Sinai. Tickle the audience with your feather wand and then tell them it was wrong.
Why is this even on my mind?!
For one, I hadn’t watched anything by Bill Cosby since 17 May 2004, when he gave his speech to the NAACP for the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. There he let his true colors show. Where he was once subtle about pandering to middle-class nuclear audiences on a strict diet of clean humor, he then became a beacon for primarily conservative ideologies based around the “personal responsibility” to seek out education and in turn (to borrow a more recent phrase) realize the American dream.
While Cosby was spot on addressing the need for members of poor communities (black or whatever) to rally around the ideal of education and self-determinism, Michael E. Dyson reminds that there is a difference between this necessity and it being the only solution to the problem; or put conversely, the centrality of the “blame-the-poor” argument that mass poverty was brought upon such black communities precisely by its own members for lack of priority on education, or their aversion to it for fear of acting white, or general laziness, or lack of moral decency and destiny. As Dyson so eloquently put it:
By convincing poor blacks that their lot in life is purely of their own making, Cosby draws on harsh conservative ideas that overlook the big social factors that continue to reinforce poverty: dramatic shifts in the economy, low wages, chronic underemployment, job and capital flight, downsizing and outsourcing, and crumbling inner-city schools.
It’s a set of harsh conservative ideas that resonate well with many middle/upper-class families from different minority backgrounds who feel they [or some member of their family before them] embraced a crucial life chance that propelled their living conditions forward. I was raised in a Jewish family, and I’ve known many Jews who think they “really get” Bill Cosby, way before he spoke about any of this. They like the clean humor, the aversion towards drugs, the honor of being a mother, the childlike innocence of a father, the miracle of childbirth and raising kids. They sometimes talk about how Jewish and black cultures intersect, how there are many similarities between the two – including comedy styles (N.B. Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy owes much to the style of Cosby’s, but isn’t it ironic that for all its success as a top-dollar sitcom, Seinfeld never scored within the top 50 sitcoms among black audience ratings in its entire run?) - and many of them, ironically enough, are surreptitious racists themselves! They want to feel that blacks (poor blacks) are the weight in the economy currently pulling down on credit.
This life chance phenomenon is interesting. An article in the New York Times from 2004 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. addresses it:
It’s important to talk about life chances — about the constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But to treat black people as if they’re helpless rag dolls swept up and buffeted by vast social trends — as if they had no say in the shaping of their lives — is a supreme act of condescension.
You can paint the picture in many monotone ways. One is to interpret the whole story as a series of missed opportunities, in which a majority of low-income blacks failed to realize the moment when they could have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. I can’t think of anything more truly condescending than reinforcing this extreme conservative view, especially when so many social programs (i.e. the desegregation programs in municipal public schools across many cities) that have been in place for decades now run the gamut in deadweight loss. Personal irresponsibility pales in comparison to this baffling, carefully calculated and nominally much more significant set of missed opportunities. The irony is that 26 years after this standup film I’m watching was released, we’ve finally nominated a black candidate for the office of President with amazing qualifications, who both acknowledges the need for personal responsibility and destiny within poor communities, but who takes the logical next step by simultaneously recognizing an urgency for reform – and who proposes an entirely fresh vision for social action on the part of the government.
Cosby was asked about Obama in February this year. He told reporters that Obama should be seen as an archetypal black success story, where hard work and loyalty toward one’s education pay off. When asked in the same interview whether he endorses the Obama ticket, Cosby refused to comment, replying simply, “When I walk in the voting booth, that’s me. I got one last thing to do, and it’s my business. Even my wife doesn’t know where I’m going.” And of course, don’t forget that Obama’s background was at least a bit more affluent than those of the families Cosby denounces regularly in speeches at their very own churches. Now that’s comedy!
Colin Powell put in his good word for Obama today, endorsing him for his “electrifying… transformational” character and for McCain’s increasingly narrow campaign. If prominent conservative black personalities are going to commend Obama for his personal traits, they ought to do it for ones that matter, like Mr. Powell’s; not for an easy, watered down, self-serving and slightly obscured call for education in a blame-the-poor agenda. It’s up to everybody to resist simple conclusions, and anyone who thinks racism isn’t at least looming in the background of this campaign needs to reconcile with Obama bucks.
I’m a Louis Armstrong fan, and along with many jazz enthusiasts I refute the claim that Armstrong breathed life into the black stereotype of a theatrical Uncle Tom. But if any such Uncle Tom is possible, the Emmy goes to Bill Cosby. The stand-up last night made me squirm because I couldn’t help but think of other artists like Strauss and Mahler, each “pardoned” of their Jewish ties by members of the Nazi party for their great value to society. Now, in no way do I find either Strauss nor Mahler’s music pandering toward a common denominator, or in any way wagging the dog at the German geist. Both men spent their careers writing exquisite and wholly original music, personal, progressive with regard to the predominate German aesthetic and yet still German, yet if it weren’t for their worth as creators forwarding of the German condition, the Nazis would have had their way with them too. I am merely seeing the tendency of a society to “forgive” its most outspoken individuals if they don’t meet its racial requisites. This seems to be the case for Bill Cosby.
