Show Business: He has a hot TV series, a new book
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The bedroom is set dark. Two young brothers who interest a crowded bed are busily not going to catnap. As one of them, Bill Cosby, describes it years later in a noteworthy monologue, the night is an extended comedy-stage show of horseplay, taunting and hand-to-mete combat: “I’m tellin’ Dad, I’m tellin’ Dad . . .” “I never hit you, I never hit you . . .” Each outpouring is followed by a visit from their father, who thunders like Zeus, “If I informed entertain any more laughing . . . I’m accepted to KILL YOU!”
Flash forward. Cosby is the architect now, presiding over a brood of five children on TV’s top-rated series. When he arrives home in one affair, three of his daughters begin fawning over him. “What’s blown up or on fire?” asks Dad skeptically. The youngest, it turns out, has cut photographs out of some of his favorite books to enterprising a report for school. But Dad neither explodes nor affixes rap, just leafs resignedly through her handiwork. “Very high-minded report,” he comments. “Very high-priced.”
Slow dissolve. Cosby has just eminent a notable birthday, prompting new thoughts — and a new technique — for America’s most noted father. “I recently turned fifty,” he writes at the inception of his book Time Flies, “which is immature for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and old for a quarter-miler, whose son now says, ‘Dad I well-founded can’t run the quarter with you anymore unless I produce a overthrow something to read.’ “
Perhaps no performer in history has chronicled his duration cycle so thoroughly, or so publicly, as Bill Cosby. Certainly no one has been so winning at it. Even Cosby, a man fond of outsize cigars and bizarre hyperbole, would have trouble overstating the freedom of his popularity. As main attraction and chief architect of The Cosby Show, idiot box’s No. 1-rated program for three right seasons, he dominates the medium as no top has since the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. And he has parlayed his TV ascendancy into a multimedia empire that seems to grow like the big tales the young stand-up hilarious once spun out of his Philadelphia childhood.
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