We Need To Talk About Cosby

2022, d. W. Kamau Bell - Showtime

In 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress was performing on stage in Philadelphia, and started joking/shit talking Bill Cosby, calling him out both for his grumpy old man antics of patronising black youth, and for being a rapist.  The former critique had been levied against Cosby by many for his then decade long crusade at critiquing segments of black culture with a sanctimoniousness and piousness that he felt he'd earned because he was rich, famous and successful at being a comedian.  The latter accusation was not new, but it was a perfect storm of social media relevance that the unauthorized phone-cam recording of Buress' routine exploded all over the internet and mainstream news.  

Survivors of Cosby's druggings and sexual assaults started coming forward, it seemed like every week for a year there was another.  With the first half dozen it was already hard to ignore the truth. Once the testimonials reached over 60, it was impossible to deny (for most people).  Cosby is a rapist.

Like pretty much every North American Gen-Xer, I grew up on Cosby.  The Cosby Show was as formative to my childhoold as Star Wars, DC Comics and He-Man.  Cosby for nearly a decade was called "America's dad", and I think the Huxtable family was the most idyllic family on TV, back when there was such a thing as an idyllic family.  Cosby was one of the first stand-ups I had seen, and his book "Fatherhood" was one of the first non-children's books I read.  

It's important that kids grow up to see their parents as human, not infallible matriarchs and patriarchs.  It's also important not to idolize blindly, to recognize that artists, writers, performers, athletes...for all their talent, they're human and capable of human things, great or monstrous.

But we're human too.  Our emotions, our history, our nostalgia sometimes cause us to think without rationalizing, to shut out any doubt or possible injury, to deny the truth.  Despite the overwhelming number of women who have come out (and, sadly, the likelihood of many many more who haven't) there are deniers, Cosby supporters who refuse to engage with the stories of Cosby's victims and blindly have faith in "America's dad". 

This four-hour, four-part documentary from comedian W. Kamau Bell isn't a product of that doubt -- although it addresses it -- it's more for the believers.  It's for those of us who have been wrestling with the conflict of this once cherished figure and the truth of the deeds he's been committing since at least the 1960's and across his entire career.  I didn't want to watch this, to be confronted with the horrible deeds of this man, but, as the title suggests, I needed to.

Bell doesn't just focus on the bad, but he gives a very thorough and wistful assessment of Cosby's groundbreaking rise in comedy, then as an actor and public figure in the 1960s, his activist roots in the 1970s that led to a passion to teach the kids who maybe weren't getting the same quality of education based on their demographic or didn't have teachers who looked like them.  As he had so broadly appealed to adults in the 1970s, he entrenched himself in the lives of young Black (and beyond) children through Picture Pages, Fat Albert and more.  The 1980's brought Cosby to new heights of fame with The Cosby Show, inarguably the biggest show of the decade, and he maintained his wholesome image throughout the 1990s up until he became so preachy about the Black culture his wealth and celebrity had detached him from.

But for all the many achievements that Bell and his broad roster of talking heads - including other comedians, college professors, journalists, sex therapists, and Cosby's victims - cite, it can't help but come back to what else Cosby was up to while he was achieving these accolades: compulsively drugging and raping women, and then either gaslighting them or intimidating them afterwards.  Even his image --the clean-cut, trustworthy family man, educator, America's teacher, America's dad -- Bell and others posit, was in service of making his ability to lure his victims easier, and to make seeding doubt in their mind afterward possible.

It's a thorough documentary that, even after four hours, still struggles with the question of what do we do with Cosby and his legacy.  He did so much, but he did so much while committing (and often in service of) his horrific deeds.  He changed the face of what Black people could be both in front of and behind the scenes, and how people saw Black culture following the civil rights movement, but that doesn't give Cosby a free pass for sexual assault.  Nothing gives anyone a free pass for sexual assault, except a patriarchal system that refuses to believe women and punishes them for speaking out, rather than their assailants for committing the assault.  

Cosby himself, Bell points out -- with documented interviews Cosby gave, comedy set pieces he would tell, subtext within his TV shows, and stories written in his books OVER DECADES -- had a deep-rooted obsession with the concept of Spanish Fly, of "loosening women up", of a miracle pill that made "gettin' it on" easier.  It's damning, and disgusting to see the comedy set from the late 60's and then Cosby talking to Larry King about the same thing in the early 90's.  The key point in the end of the documentary is noting that Cosby doesn't believe he did anything wrong.  It's not that he's denying what he did (as he did admit to it in a sealed deposition, which after being unsealed and used in court was ultimately what got his conviction overturned), it's that he believes that he's allowed to do what he did.  

I  have had a difficult time with Cosby since shortly after his sanctimonious shit started up, but since 2014, it's been cemented that I am done with him.  Though I found myself laughing at clips of Cosby's comedy routines and The Cosby Show episodes featured in this documentary, there's no way for me to go back to them, to separate the art from the artist.  With some artists, sometimes I can... most times I can't.  Yes, he's got some amazing work in his past, some stuff that remains funny in spite of his revealed character.  The man's undeniably talented.  He was good at what he does. Including raping women.