Word: comical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cosby's drive, like much of his comic material, flows from his tough and tender upbringing in a north Philadelphia housing project. His family endured poverty and prejudice but did not surrender to illiteracy. The Cosby home echoed with the sounds of people making up funny stories and listening to others on the radio. Bill's mother Anna would tuck him and his three brothers into their pajamas, the kind with booties sewn in and flaps in the back, and read aloud from Twain and Swift, the brothers Grimm and the Bible...
...rated program for three straight seasons, he dominates the medium as no star has since the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. And he has parlayed his TV success into a multimedia empire that seems to grow like the tall tales the young stand-up comic once spun out of his Philadelphia childhood...
Cosby developed his style by studying such comics as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, whose 2,000-Year-Old Man routine "taught me that if the audience knows you can be funny when you want to be, they will be willing to wait for that payoff." Among his early routines was a famous bit in which God tries to convince a skeptical Noah that he should build an ark. But Cosby soon gravitated toward a more fertile subject: his childhood. In vivid, richly textured narratives, he told of cutting up with neighborhood characters like Old Weird Harold and Fat Albert...
Cosby's now fabled return to prime time was still years away. Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, two ABC program executives, had approached Cosby's agent, Norman Brokaw, several times about creating a sitcom for the comic but had generated no interest. Early in 1984 that changed. Cosby says he had spent some time watching TV and was appalled at the "lack of anything you could feel good about watching with your family. It was all car chases and breasts and characters yelling at each other and saying Yowie!" Carsey and Werner (who had since left ABC and formed their...
...grandeur against the balloon-pricking impishness of a cast culled from Saturday Night Live (Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest), Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook) and Not the Nine o'Clock News (Mel Smith). The air will billow with bombastic insults ("You hippopotamic land mass!") and a record-breaking number of comic speech impediments...