Cosby, Bill 1937–

Bill Cosby 1937–

Comedian, actor, producer, educator, and author

At a Glance…

Became a Comedian

I Spy and Beyond

The Cosby Show

Rose to the Top

Selected writings

Sources

Bill Cosby, one of television’s funniest and most popular co-medic actors, has spent his long career making people laugh. Cosby first gained prominence as a comedian in the early 1960s, when he vaulted from telling jokes in Philadelphia night-spots to the top of the nightclub circuit and then to television. Cosby became the first African American to star in a television drama when he appeared on I Spy in 1965. In the 1980s, in the role of Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, he headed television’s first educated, middle-class black family in the wildly successful Cosby Show. Though best known for his television appearances, Cosby has made more than 20 comedy albums, appeared in films, published a string of humorous books, and pitched products for Jell-O, Kodak, and a variety of other companies.

Cosby’s humor springs from life’s absurdities. As a young comic, he told long funny stories about his childhood in Philadelphia and his experiences at Temple University. In the 1970s and 1980s, he wove humorous yarns from family events, such as a child’s trip to the dentist. In the 1990s, he addressed aging and the consequences of raising wealthy children.

William Henry Cosby, Jr., was born in 1937 in the German-town district of North Philadelphia. He grew up in the all-black Richard Allen housing project where his mother, Anna Cosby, struggled to raise him and his younger brothers, Russell and Robert. His father, William Cosby, Sr., served as a mess steward in the U.S. Navy and was away for months at a time. As a child, Cosby loved comedy radio shows. “I always listened for the comedy,” he told the Los Angeles Times: “Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Jimmy Durante, Fred Allen.… When comedy was on, I was just happy to be alive.” By the fifth grade he was getting up in front of his class and making everybody laugh, including his teacher.

Cosby’s high IQ led teachers to place him in a class for gifted students, but outside interests eventually derailed his school career. Between work and playing football, basketball, baseball, and running track, he found little time for schoolwork. When he was told he would have to repeat the tenth grade at Germantown High, he dropped out. “The truth is,” he recalled in the Los Angeles Times, “I’d just grown very tired of myself and thought perhaps there was a career for me in the

At a Glance…

Born William Henry Cosby, Jr., July 12, 1937, in Germantown, PA; son of William Henry, Sr. (a U.S. Navy mess steward) and Anna (a domestic worker) Cosby; married Camille Hanks, January 25, 1964; children: Erika, Erinn, Ennis, Ensa, Evin. Education: Attended Temple University, 1961-62; University of Massachusetts, M.A., 1972, Ed.D., 1977.

Actor, comedian, recording artist, author. Nightclub comedian, 1963–. Television actor, appearing in I Spy, 1965-68, The Bill Cosby Show, 1969-71, The Cosby Show, 1984-92, and The Cosby Mysteries, 1994; creator of children’s animated series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. 1972-75, and The New Fat Albert Show, 1979–94; host of You Bet Your Life. 1992-93, Film appearances include roles in Hickey and Boggs, 1972, Man and Bay, 1972, Uptown Saturday Night, 1974, Let’s Do It Again, 1975, Mother, Juggs & Speed, 1976, A Piece of the Action, 1977, California Suite, 1978, The Devil and Max Devlin, 1981, Bill Cosby Himself, 1983, Leonard Part VI, 1967, and Ghost Dad, 1990. Commercial spokesperson for Jell-O Pudding, Kodak Film, and other products. Military service: Served in U.S. Navy, 1956–60.

Member: United Negro College Fund, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Operation PUSH, Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame (president). Sickle Cell Foundation.

Awards: Spingam Medal, NAACP, 1985; eight Grammy awards for best comedy album; four Emmy awards; NAACP Image Award; Golden Globe Award; four People’s Choice awards; Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame inductee.

Addresses: Office —P.O. Box 4049, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Agent —The Brokaw Co., 9255 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069.

service. If you stayed in for 20 years, you knew at least you’d get a certain amount of money for the rest of your life.” Cosby enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1956.

Away from school, Cosby realized the importance of an education and used his four years in the military to prepare for the day he would continue in school. Cosby learned physical therapy, traveled around the Western Hemisphere, and earned a high school equivalency diploma through correspondence courses. In 1961, at the age of 23, the navy veteran won a track and field scholarship to Temple University.

Became a Comedian

For two years, Cosby studied physical education, ran track, and played right halfback on Temple’s football team. During his sophomore year, however, Cosby got his first job telling jokes while tending bar at a Philadelphia coffeehouse called the Cellar. His salary was five dollars a night. According to Cosby, this was the real beginning of his comedy career. “I understood that if people enjoy conversation with the bartender, they leave tips,” he told the Los Angeles Times “So I began collecting jokes, and learning how to work them up, stretch them out.”

From the Cellar he moved to a Philadelphia nightclub called the Underground and finally, in the spring of 1962, to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where for $60 a week and a room without plumbing he worked the Gaslight Cafe. At the Gaslight, he told long funny stories which brought everyday events to absurd but sweet conclusions. His comedy was one of understatement, wild sound effects, a rubbery face, and far-ranging characterizations.

The Gaslight tripled Cosby’s salary, and within months the William Morris Agency signed him to a management contract. He soon cut a comedy album and traveled the comedy club circuit, performing at the “hungry i” in San Francisco, Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago, and the Flamingo in Las Vegas. Cosby’s temporary leave from Temple soon became permanent. No longer a student, Bill Cosby was now a comedian.

Cosby was “a new kind of black comedian,” wrote Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television: “In suit and tie, he looked like a well-brought-up, serious college student, a smart fellow geared to make it. Unlike Redd Foxx or Slappy White, who… had performed material directly pitched towards black audiences, Cosby was [a] crossover.” Asked to explain the absence of racial material in his humor, Cosby told a Newsweek interviewer in 1963, “I’m trying to reach all the people. I want to play John Q. Public.”

I Spy and Beyond

In 1965, television producer Sheldon Leonard saw Cosby on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Leonard was impressed and cast Cosby as Alex Scott, an undercover CIA agent in NBC’s action adventure series I Spy. The part of the witty, multilingual Scott was intended for a white actor—no African American had ever had a lead role in a dramatic series. Nevertheless, Cosby played it with ease. He won three Emmy Awards and began what would be his pattern of playing successful, educated blacks in a medium dominated by negative images of African Americans.

I Spy left the air after three hit seasons, but Cosby returned to television in 1969 in the Bill Cosby Show as Chet Kincaid, a physical education teacher helping disadvantaged kids in a fictional Los Angeles neighborhood. The show remained on the air for two years but was not a hit. In fact, Cosby’s acting career foundered a bit in the early 1970s. The Bill Cosby Show was canceled in the spring of 1971; his first film feature, Hickey and Boggs, was poorly received, and his 1972 comedy/variety television show, the New Bill Cosby Show, failed to find an audience.

Cosby next found success with the unlikely program Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, an animated kids show which debuted in 1972 and became a fixture on Saturday morning television. Fat Albert’s storylines came from Cosby’s comedy albums and boyhood memories, and Cosby served as executive producer and host. After each humorous but instructive adventure of Fat Albert, Weird Harold, Mush Mouth, and the other characters, Cosby would appear on screen and draw a lesson from the show’s events that aimed to help kids put their experiences in perspective. According to Vibe contributor Cathleen Campbell, “The message was the same every time: We have the power to turn alienation into a sense of community, the power to rediscover and reinvent.” The critically acclaimed program remained in production until 1984.

In the mid-1970s, Cosby teamed with actor-director Sidney Poitier for two successful movie comedies, 1974’s Uptown Saturday Night and 1975’s Let’s Do It Again. In Uptown Saturday Night he portrayed Wardell Franklin, a taxi driver trying to recover a stolen lottery ticket from the mob, in a performance the New Yorker praised as “very funny.” Though Let’s Do It Again was less successful, critics hailed Cosby as a major comedic talent. Still, the comedian struggled to find consistent success. Mother, Jugs & Speed, a 1976 film co-starring Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel, flopped, as did Cos, a variety show for kids, and the 1977 film A Piece of the Action, which reunited him with Poitier.

Though his successful career as an entertainer made a college degree unnecessary, Cosby spent much of the 1970s earning advanced degrees in education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The university allowed him to substitute life experience for his uncompleted bachelor’s degree and his work in prisons and on the kid’s television program Electric Company for its teaching requirement. Cosby wrote a 242-page dissertation called “An Integration of the Visual Media via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning,” and in May of 1977, he was awarded a doctorate of education.

Cosby determined by the mid-1970s that he would take advantage of his wide public visibility, and his acumen as a businessman and corporate spokesman prompted Forbes magazine to call the comedian: “Bill Cosby, capitalist.” With newly hired lawyer Herbert Chaice, Cosby began to seek ways to gain a portion of the profits he generated. Their strategies led to Cosby’s attaining interests in the Coca-Cola Company, for which he had long been a spokesman, and in other business ventures. Cosby also became a ubiquitous pitchman whose commercials for Jell-O, Kodak, Del Monte, Ford Motor Company, and other businesses made him one of the most recognizable people in America.

While Cosby remained a strong nightclub act in this period, his film and television work continued to be less than impressive. He and Richard Pry or portrayed bumbling dentists in 1979’s California Suite, roles which the New Yorker complained had “racist overtones.” He appeared in Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin and was featured in the in-concert film Bill Cosby —Himself. He also worked as a guest host for the Tonight Show where, according to Donald Bogle, he “came across as rather arrogant and occasionally insensitive, looking a little like a Vegas burnout case.”

The Cosby Show

In 1982 Cosby let it be known that he was interested in a weekly series. Production companies, recognizing his popularity, jumped with offers. Cosby chose a show pitched by former ABC executives Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, and demanded a salary and an equal split of all of the show’s profits. Werner and Carsey agreed to this rare arrangement, and on September 20, 1984, The Cosby Show debuted on NBC. As Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, Cosby and his lawyer wife, played by Phylicia Rashad, dealt with the ups and downs of family life. The show’s humor was warm and universal. The New York Times called it “the classiest and most entertaining new situation comedy of the season.” It reached number three in its first year, was number one for the next four seasons, and remained in the top twenty until its final episode in 1992. The Cosby Show had 80 million regular viewers at the height of its popularity and its ratings pulled NBC from third to first place among the networks.

The show—which mirrored Cosby’s own life with his wife, Camille, and their five children—generated a large sociological debate, since it portrayed African Americans and parents as they had never been seen on television before. The New York Timer’s Bill Carter wrote that “it restored the television image of the parent as loving authority figure, and it gave viewers, black and white, an unwaveringly positive look at family life, as lived in a home headed by two professional parents who happened to be black.” Some attacked The Cosby Show for presenting an unrealistically idealized portrait of the black family. The Huxtables were too well off, too smart, too “perfect,” said critics. To this, Cosby responded that his television family offered a positive alternative to harsher images available on television and elsewhere.

Asked if he thought The Cosby Show would have been as popular if it had been more aggressive on racial issues, Cosby told the Los Angeles Times: “No. Because I don’t know how to do that without getting angry at racial bigotry. That’s not funny to me.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of Harvard University’s African American Studies Program, told the New York Times that Cosby “put race and economic issues on the back burner so we could see a black family dealing with all the things black people deal with the same as all other people. It was the first time most of us as black people have felt a sense of identity with and resemblance to the kind of values we have in common, our relationships with our parents and our siblings.”

“No series in the history of television … has ever been more about education,” wrote Dennis A. Williams in Emerge. The Huxtable parents consistently reminded their children of the importance of a college education, and the opening credit that listed “William H. Cosby, Jr., Ed.D.” was a powerful reminder of where education could take a person. Both The Cosby Show and its spinoff, A Different World (set in a fictional black college), made higher education a viable option to thousands of young blacks. During their run, applications to African American colleges went up dramatically. “You’ve got to figure we made a heck of an impression on people who wanted to go to college,” Cosby told the Los Angeles Times.

Rose to the Top

When The Cosby Show went into syndication in 1987, Bill Cosby, as half owner of the show’s profits, became a very rich man. According to Forbes, competing independent stations doubled previous records in their bidding for the program. By 1992 total syndication for the show reached $1 billion, of which Cosby received $333 million. With all this money, Cosby and his wife, Camille, became active philanthropists. In 1988 they donated $20 million to Spelman College in Atlanta, the biggest single contribution ever made to a black college.

During The Cosby Show’s eight-year run, Cosby published four books: Fatherhood (1986), Time Flies (1987), Love and Marriage (1989), and Childhood (1991). Each of the fast-paced and hilarious books hit the best seller list, though critical reaction was mixed. The New York Times’s Karen Ray complained that Fatherhood contained “only one joke … stretched and stretched some more.” But Laura Green wrote in the same paper that readers of Love and Marriage would “giggle with self-recognition.” Less successful were the movies he made during this period. Critics and audiences agreed that Leonard Part VI (1987) and Ghost Dad (1990) were undisputed and undistinguished duds.

As the children in The Cosby Show grew older and went off to college or got married, some critics complained of a decline in quality. But the show remained popular as Cosby showcased black entertainers, used the character of Theo to mirror his own son’s struggle with a learning disability, and brought in women writers to focus on a female character’s first period and the problems of a teenage girl who is pressured to have sex.

Williams applauded The Cosby Show for being the most ethnically diverse program on television, but “most significantly,” he wrote, “Cosby combines unspoken racial pride and its color-blind premise in a conscious promotion of personal achievement that might please both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.” In the spring of 1992, The Cosby Show ended its fabulously successful run. “I don’t have anything left to say,” Cosby told the New York Times. “That may be why it’s not a sad, sad moment. I’m satisfied.”

Not one to rest on his laurels, Cosby returned to television the following fall with a syndicated version of the old Groucho Marx game show You Bet Your Life. You Bet Your Life was supposed to be a sure money maker but was canceled midway through its first season due to low ratings. Cosby went back to NBC for a series of light television mystery movies in 1993, to be followed by The Cosby Mysteries series in 1994.

Though Cosby has always avoided racial humor in his comedy, the highly-respected star began to speak out about portrayals of blacks in American entertainment in the 1990s. Upon his 1994 induction into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, Cosby asked network television executives to “stop this horrible massacre of images (of African Americans) that are being put on the screen now. I’m begging you, because it isn’t us.” A few months earlier, Cosby told Newsweek: “Someone at the very top has to say, ‘OK, enough of this.…’ Today’s writers look on TV as just a joke machine. And when it comes to African Americans, the joke’s on us.” About this issue, the man who has made millions telling jokes is clearly not joking.

Selected writings

The Wit and Wisdom of Fat Albert, Windmill Books, 1973.

Bill Cosby’s Personal Guide to Tennis Power; or, Don’t Lower the Lob, Raise the Net, Random House, 1975.

Fatherhood, Doubleday, 1986.

Time Flies, Doubleday, 1987.

Love and Marriage, Doubleday, 1989.

Childhood, Putnam, 1991.

Sources

Books

Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Film and Television, Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Cohen, David, and Charles M. Collins, editors, The African Americans, Viking Studio Books, 1993.

Salley, Columbus, The Black 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential African-Americans, Past and Present, Citadel Press, 1992.

Periodicals

Broadcasting, February 22, 1993, p. 5.

Ebony, June 1977.

Emerge, May 1992, pp. 22-26.

Essence, March 1994, p. 84.

Forbes, September 28, 1992, p. 85.

Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1989, p. Calendar-6; April 26, 1992, p. Calendar-7; August 28, 1992, p. F1.

Newsweek, June 17, 1963; December 6, 1993, pp. 59-61.

New Yorker, June 17, 1974, p. 89; January 8, 1979, p. 49.

New York Times, September 20, 1984, p. C30; December 18, 1987, p. C30; January 21, 1988, p. C26; November 8, 1988, p. A1; January 12, 1989, p. D21; May 14, 1989, sec. 7, p. 23; February 21, 1991, p. C13; October 27, 1991, sec. 7, p. 20; April 26, 1992, sec. 2, p. 1.

Playboy, December 1985.

Time, July 16, 1990, p. 86; February 28, 1994, pp. 60-62.

Vibe, November 1993, p. 120.

Additional information for this profile was taken from Bill Cosby: In Words and Pictures (an Ebony/Jet special issue), by Robert E. Johnson, Johnson Publishing.

—Jordan Wankoff