Erstellt am: 20. 7. 2015 - 16:45 Uhr
I Never Liked Bill Cosby
The Real Cosby Show
I'm not being all wiser after-the-fact and you'll just have to take my word for it - I never liked Bill Cosby.
This episode of the Cosby show is especially creepy now that all of Bill Cosby's accusers have spoken: http://t.co/W0TVjxysie
— Ross Sheingold (@RossSheingold) July 11, 2015I totally watched The Cosby Show when I was a teenager growing up in Canada but I only watched it to see what Lisa Bonet was wearing. I never liked the way Bill Cosby, in his role as the head of an affluent African-American family, in all his Dr. Huxtable 'gosh-ain't-I-wise-yet-whimsically-funny?!' -glory, condescended to me as a 'mere' teenager.
I was also suspicious of how the two oldest Huxtable daughters were exceptionally light-skinned (these characters ranged in age from 16 to 18 so they were meant to have sex appeal obviously) while the youngest daughters and the son and Cosby himself were given the comically meaty lines and so weren't there to be 'pretty' and were much darker-skinned.
In this episode the lesson kids are supposed to learn is all about how bad it is to lie.
So, The Cosby Show got on my nerves but I was totally into the animated TV series Fat Albert in the seventies. It reflected what I could identify with - goofy kids of all different shades of colour (even though girls were kinda missing), kids who weren't rich and the whole thing had a funky pace to it and a funky soundtrack. The adult 'real' man who would pop up in between the cartoon bits (Bill Cosby doing his 'I am educating North America'-thing for the first time on a big scale) was a nuisance for me if I recall correctly.
Just like his Pudding Pop/Gelatine Pops commercials back in the day. Irritating - BIG TIME.
I never got, why people thought of him as such a king of comedy either as I got older and was given one of his records to listen to. He just did unfunny voices and that's it. To me, anyways.
I know many people regard Bill Cosby as a pioneer when it comes to 'African American comedy' but I'm more a Richard Pryor girl when it comes to the pioneering comedians of the sixties.
After The Cosby Show finished its run in 1992, Bill Cosby appointed himself the moral compass of African American culture. He let rappers and contemporary comedians know, they were ruining the fabric of a genteel society by using the 'N'-word and by the example they were setting with their chosen form of expression.
He had all sorts of advice on how to live your life according to his high standards of social responsibility and progress and he was giving the advice up until just over a year ago!
So, what advice would you give you now Bill Cosby?
It was an open-secret for a looooong time in Hollywoodland and thanks to a one-off joke by contemporary comedian and actor Hannibal Buress, the lid was publicly lifted on the fact that Bill Cosby liked to drug women and rape them.
I say 'fact' because we're now at a new point in the narrative wherein Bill Cosby is a serial rapist.
EPA/ JEFF KOWALSKY
The 40-plus women who have come forward with recollections of how they would be invited by Cosby to a hotel room or some other secluded place, be given a drink and then wake up knowing they had been sexually assaulted, faced strong criticism/disbelief/condemnation for accusing America's Dad of such a terrible thing.
Well, we now know Bill Cosby drugged with the intent to sexually assault because he admitted it. In a deposition he desperately wanted to keep sealed and not available to the public out of respect for his privacy. An American judge decided, nope - Cosby is a public figure and has played a role as public moralist. The judge added the way he used his position as a public person to negate the accusations of the women was not only socially irresponsible but illegal.
I'm not sure if the statute of limitations in the American justice system will stop Bill Cosby from being held accountable for raping women up to 50 years ago. I'm not sure if civil suits will mean he will be held accountable in a fiscal way before the 78 year-old dies.
What I do know is that the women who accused Cosby have been vindicated in the arena of general public opinion and the witch-hunt against them should serve as an example for future cases where those in power who are seemingly righteous and 'good' are to be considered as not just flawed but quite possibly criminally decrepit.