The creative work of men like Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby is forever tainted by the sexual crimes they are accused of, and in the case of Bill Cosby, convicted of and serving time for. Lake Effect Essayist Tom Matthews says he’s torn, and shares his essay, "The Funny Thing About Bill Cosby."
My father died a Bill Cosby fan.
It was March 1971, and I was 10. My dad, a doctor in a small Wisconsin town, left home after breakfast one school day and was gone by lunch. A heart attack at 40 years old. No warning, no lingering. Just gone.
Ironically, the trauma of this has blacked out just how traumatic it all was. Along with pretty much every memory I have of him.
But one of the few things I recall clearly from the immediate aftermath of this nightmare?
I had Bill Cosby to lean on.
Somehow I ended up with Dad’s homemade cassette of one of Cosby’s earliest albums after he died – did he give it to me? I think I just decided that he did. Allow me this; I truly have very little of him that just the two of us shared.
The cassette was a cloudy, opaque orange. Given the era, Dad had to have held a microphone in front of a speaker as the record yielded this bootleg. It took some effort for him to get hold of this.
If you know those first Cosby albums, you know those bits: Noah. Tonsils. A monster lurking in the dark by the name of Chicken Heart. They were wise and sly and silly. Many of them were told from the perspective of a little kid, just like me, wonderfully capturing what it was like to be excited or angry or scared. And, boy, was I scared.
Those bits got me through when my world fell in. They really did.
Which, nearly 50 years later, has become complicated.
Bill Cosby is now in jail for a lifetime of sexual assault, and that is how it should be. But there are those who are suggesting that the artistic work of all such men should be retroactively declared tainted beyond redemption. The Cosby Show, adored by millions at a time when they could not have known the vile, off-camera truth about Cosby, went overnight from saturation airing on countless cable channels to absolute zero. Like it never existed.
A few years later, the precedent having been set, episodes of the original Roseanne were similarly disappeared from the airwaves – this time not for ties to sexual assault but for its star’s ugly, racist language.
This is a slippery slope in artistic purging that should give a chill to anyone who works in creative expression. What gets erased next from the public memory? And for what offense? As defined by who? There’s an air of fundamentalism about this that is kind of scary.
But, okay. Maybe we can’t have the life’s work of a sex criminal still out there to burnish his legend and perhaps still entertain someone who doesn’t know better.
But I have a question:
If you hold this belief, and you were able to travel back in time with today’s knowledge of Cosby’s crimes, would you have plucked that cassette away from poor, fat, ten-year-old me, taking comfort in the gentle humor of this very bad man? Let’s be blunt: Charges against Cosby date back to the mid-sixties; even then, it appears I may have been consoled by a rapist.
And yet the stories he performed on the stage, that went through the microphone onto the record that made it to the cassette that passed from my father to me – that I just now listened to for the first time since Dad died?
They’re wonderful; then and now. Sorry. I guess.
I went on to have an extremely satisfying and at times lucrative writing career, much of it rooted in what I have been given to believe is a pretty good sense of humor. That must be traced back to my earliest exposure to comedy, in the same way that a guitarist today is shaped by – almost at the DNA level – the first Beatles song that inspired them.
I was never going to be a doctor like Dad, but you can’t convince me that the Cosby he laid on me did not help set me on my writer’s path. That is valuable to me beyond measure.
So here’s where I land on this: I still treasure Bill Cosby’s work that amused me, and comforted me, and tilled the soil for all the comedy that came after. I regret that that work can no longer be appreciated divorced from the context that must now forever poison it.
But as for Cosby himself? Jail for the rest of his life sounds just about right to me.
No joke.
Lake Effect essayist Tom Matthews is a writer who lives in Wauwatosa. His latest novel is Raising the Dad.
