Bill Cosby Takes The Prize, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #141

October 26, 2009 Mike Gold 1 Comment

After being asked repeatedly over the past twelve years, Bill Cosby has finally agreed to accept the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The presentation, to be made tonight, will air next week.

I am not here to dump on Mr. Cosby. He’s a great comedian, and I am not opposed to the many of opinions he expresses. I’m even in agreement with some. Of course there’s a “but” here.

Cosby turned down the award because he didn’t like the language used by some of the entertainers honored and presented at the Twain Award over the years, starting with their first honoree, Richard Pryor. “I told them flat out no because I will not be used, nor will Mark Twain be used, in that way,” Bill told The Associated Press. Subsequent recipients include Whoopi Goldberg and George Carlin, also known for such language. Cosby has often expressed public distain for his fellow comedians who resort to such language.

That’s his right. It’s also his right to use his celebrity to express those views. For me, there’s a big disconnect with the issue. These offensive words have no reason. A bunch of old coots decided which words are offensive without ever having to explain why. It’s okay to use their approved euphemisms that everybody over the age of four knows – even little Bobby on his way to his day care school knows that “frak” and “frig” are acceptable versions of the worst of those bad words, the one that denotes the beast with two backs. It’s not the act or the action that’s offensive to these people, it’s this word and not those other ones that mean the same thing.

There’s a word for that, too. It’s called hypocrisy. Bill Cosby didn’t invent it, he’s just the current standard bearer for the movement. He used to be a regular at the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, surrounded by slightly dressed and undressed women who were in possession of, as Michael Palin called it, “huge tracks of land.” His hero, Groucho Marx, was hardly a nun. Groucho was even censored: in the song “Hooray For Captain Spaulding” during the opening sequences of Animal House, Spaulding responded to Mrs. Rittenhouse’s line “You are the only white man to cover every acre” with the rejoinder “I think I’ll try and make her.” When the movie version of the Broadway musical was made, this latter line was cut. Hooray, hooray, hooray.

These horrible words have lost their shock value long ago – Cosby came up through the ranks in the post-Lenny Bruce era at the same time as Carlin and Pryor. They are now nothing more than word choices, used for a particular type of emphasis and, yes, as a means to tell the prudes to fuck off.

Offensiveness is in the mind of the beholder. Back in 1962, Cosby had a comedy routine about Noah and the flood. A lot of good, solid religious folks found this offensive. They could not tolerate the mixing of comedy with their faith: the very approach seemed to be belittling. I was not allowed to play it on commercial radio in the early 1970s. Such a reaction to basically benign material endures, as we had seen in 1979 when Monty Python’s Life of Brian was released, and in 1999 when Kevin Smith’s Dogma came out. Even Bill Maher’s Religulous, released last year, was an even-handed documentary about the role of religion in our society; it was slammed by the Faithful because Maher was an avowed atheist, which, by the way, is his right.

Whether you agree with him or not, I think it is fair to say that Cosby has spoken courageously about family values in the black communities and his idea of the need for responsibility. A lot of people were offended by those speeches. Cosby loathed the outcry that forced those public schools to ban President Obama’s speech, which expressed the socialist values of staying in school and studying hard. But there were a lot of people who were deeply offended by Obama’s action.

Well, Bill’s finally accepting the Mark Twain award. I’m glad. He deserves it.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather show starts up Sundays at 7:00 PM Eastern on www.getthepointradio.com , replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants pop up every on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday exclusively at \www.getthepointradio.com . The regular Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants continue every Monday and Friday on The Point podcasts, available right here at \www.michaeldavisworld.com , as well as at www.comicmix.com, www.getthepointradio.com, www.zzcomics.com, and www.ravenwolfstudios.com. You can subscribe to The Point podcasts at iTunes by searching under “The Point Radio.”

Gold is also a regular contributor to www comicmix.com, and edits their online comic book content. Check out the all-new GrimJack: The Manx Cat #5 and Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden #3,along with the first volume of Trevor Von Eeden’s astonishing bio-comic, The Original Johnson, now being solicited in the IDW Publishing section of this month’s Diamond catalog.