Bill Cosby at Tanglewood, May 23, 1998

by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX, May 24, 1998) -- America's favorite dad held forth for about 90 non-stop minutes at Tanglewood's Ozawa Hall on Saturday night, as Bill Cosby applied his trademark, congenial spin to a comic monologue about his educational experiences.

Along the way, Cosby touched on topics including family dysfunction, the story of Adam and Eve and the lighter side of human sexuality.

Except for a few anachronistic references to Beavis and Butthead, Cosby's talk -- both in style and substance -- could have been delivered practically verbatim in the '60s or '70s, when he first came to fame as a folksy, congenial storyteller, mining his own life and that of those around him for gently comic potential.

Cosby's talk harkened to a more innocent era, before shock comedy was the norm, and before Cosby himself was the subject of tabloid trash and the victim of familial tragedy, none of which he acknowledged in his mostly PG-rated talk.

Not that Cosby was entirely prudish. Without using the terms themselves, Cosby did bits on adolescent wet dreams and menarche, masturbation, menopausal hot flashes and male urinary incontinence.

The bulk of his routine, however, consisted of a review of his educational career, from the earliest days of learning to read and write at home through grade school, middle school, high school and college, with a brief detour in the navy.

Walking out on stage wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo from the last Lenox Library benefit, Cosby took a good look at his surroundings and murmured, "Doesn't look like a room for being funny," which of course got a big laugh.

Planting himself in a chair at center stage, Cosby took the audience back to an era when, he said, there was no such thing as child abuse. "When I was a kid, anyone could hit you for any reason," he said.

"There was no dyslexia, no A.D.D. -- you were just dumb," said Cosby, poking fun at contemporary education's infatuation with medicalizing learning and behavioral problems.

In a theme that he would return to from many angles throughout his routine, Cosby suggested that "God made little children to play," and that old people, in the form of teachers, then took it upon themselves out of jealousy to deny children this inherent right.

In the longest digression of the evening, Cosby deconstructed the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in the hopes of showing how God was "the original dysfunctional parent." While in the end he might have fallen short of his goal, along the way Cosby got a few good laughs out of the story.

As is typical of Cosby's humor, the biggest laughs were those of recognition. Thus, his riffs about high school math -- apparently the bane of everyone's existence -- were among the most successful. "If `a' divided by `b' equals `c' divided `d,' what is `y'?" asked Cosby rhetorically, and after pausing, he responded, "Too far away!"

Cosby's routine had enough built-in rhythms that toward the end, the audience gained enough comfort and familiarity that some vocally anticipated where he was headed. Cosby, of course, milked this by purposely telegraphing his material, and then scolding those audience members who dared to predict where he was going.

It was all in good fun, as was his brief foray into the crowd at the end, a mix of mingling with celebrity audience members and the common folk.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 25, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]