From the first moments of his performance on Feb. 10, it was already clear that Bill Cosby wasn’t here to offer us an ordinary comedic experience.
His deadpan facial expressions and stilted timing, which defined his comedic style on television shows such as The Cosby Show and Kids Say the Darndest Things, were as intact as they were twenty years ago.
Cosby’s charm was also potent as ever when he proudly voiced his appreciation for the Northwest landscape.
“I never realized just how beautiful this area is,” he said.
However, no one was quite prepared for his unfiltered inquisitiveness, especially not the onstage ASUPS volunteers, such as Alana Hopper, Michael Denman and Madeline Garcia, whom he immediately volleyed with questions concerning their academic disciplines and religious backgrounds.
When one of the volunteers identified themselves as an atheist, he seemed to take offense.
“Then where do you think you’ll go, huh?” he inquired.
Although he was overall quite funny, Cosby’s tone came off as somewhat patronizing toward our students—a theme which continued throughout his performance as he offered anecdotes which emphasized the quirks of his family members.
He embodied the tyranny of his wife through squawking sounds and dramatic gesticulations, for instance.
Or, as another example, he smugly admitted to the reality of his home life: “It’s my house, but her home.”
Then a significant portion of his performance was devoted to a story concerning his daughter’s drawn-out struggle to succeed at a community college.
Apparently, she couldn’t make the cut for the school until Cosby offered the president an on-campus hospital in exchange for her acceptance.
Cosby’s faith in his daughter seemed quite weak as he pondered her post-graduation career path.
“She was a dual major in Art and Law… I wondered what kinda job she’d get. Drawing with pastels in a courtroom?” he joked.
He emphasized her idiocy as she initially failed to rise above a 2.0, but eventually congratulated her perseverance when she reached a 3.8 during her senior year, which seemed an implicit form of encouragement to make our parents proud by attaining a respectable GPA.
Thankfully, in the end, Cosby recognized his own disconnect from younger generations by retelling one of his grandfather’s most humorous sayings, “When you go senile, you’ll never know it.”
Admittedly, his attitude came off as senile sometimes, at least to someone from the 21st generation.
Cosby recently published a book called, I Didn’t Ask to be Born, a title which also reflects the witty skepticism that he displayed to the Puget Sound community two weeks ago.
