![]() If you saw it and didn’t get it, we’re probably not a match. It was provocative, hilarious, and (for better or worse) the most I have ever felt seen onstage. This American Wife wasn’t just an excuse for its creators and stars to recite their favorite lines from RHOBH and RHONY - although, yes, it was that - but also a transfixing, thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between gay male identity and the conspicuous consumption of Bravo’s reality programming. But that would be discounting the genius of Breslin and Foley, who may have even more of a pathological attachment to Real Housewives (and to theater) than I do. Put on as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door series, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s This American Wife was a show I feel like I conjured into existence through sheer force of will. Harder to erase, I hope, will be two national conversations Cosby has helped to ignite, wittingly or unwittingly, about helping the poor to fight poverty and helping the victims of sexual predators to find justice.Ĭlarence Page is a member of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.BUZZFEED'S BEST PLAYS AND MUSICALS OF 2018! Now reruns of “The Cosby Show” are disappearing from cable channels, where for decades they were a money machine. But the very fact that his conviction occurred marks a breakthrough, not only for the victims but also for the rest of us who, like me, are shocked and disappointed to see the parade of prominent men who have lost their jobs over charges that used to be taken too lightly. But there can be little doubt that complaints of sexual misconduct are no longer dismissed as casually as they used to be.Ĭosby probably will appeal his conviction as he awaits sentencing. It is hard to say how much the changed atmosphere had to do with Cosby’s conviction on three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Constand. ![]() That trial ended in a hung jury last year.īut a few months later came another show-business-related event that has turned the tide for Cosby and numerous other famous and powerful men facing similar accusations: the outing of Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator, a scandal that has borne fruit in the #MeToo movement. Then Andrea Constand, an employee at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, charged that Cosby had drugged and raped her in 2004. Within days, national media were giving new respect to dozens of women who were coming forward with more stories of Cosby assaulting them sexually.īut statutes of limitation made most of the charges too old to be prosecuted. The video marked a tipping point in the national Cosby conversation. The episode might have ended there except for video caught by an audience member in an early signal of a rising digital age in which cellphone cameras change history. “So turn the crazy down a couple notches.” “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby,” said Buress, stirring a mix of laughter with gasps of surprise. “Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the ’80s,” Buress said, mocking Cosby’s practice of scolding of black youth for passing up valuable opportunities because they were not behaving properly. But it also drew praise from many in the black community and especially from white conservatives, some of whom wanted him to run for president.īut Buress, who also is African-American, changed all that after a cellphone camera caught him during a nightclub set in 2014 ripping into mounting accusations of sexual misconduct against Cosby that had previously been aired but largely ignored publicly. ![]() “And then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?”Ĭosby was criticized by some who saw his speech as being too harsh regarding the black poor, many of whom are trying hard to help themselves and their neighborhoods. “People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” he famously grumbled at one point. In the speech, which went viral on the internet, Cosby was highly critical of such social deficits in black America as the prevalence of single-parent families, conspicuous consumption at the expense of necessities and a general lack of personal responsibility. His generation is more familiar with the more grimly serious and conservative social critic who emerged in Cosby’s historic “pound cake” speech during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004. ![]() The joke was told on a stage in Philadelphia four years ago by rising Chicago-based actor-comedian Hannibal Buress.īuress, 35, is probably too young to remember much of Cosby’s heyday as “America’s dad” on stage, screen and comedy albums and other lovely honorifics from the mid-1960s through the ’90s. Looking back, it’s ironic to remember how the charges against Bill Cosby were not taken seriously until after they became a joke. ![]()
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