Bill Cosby Is As You
Remember Him in Far From Finished
By Matt Zoller Seitz | 11/17/2013
at 8:15 PM
The Comedy Central program
Far From Finished is being advertised as Bill Cosby’s first full-length
stand-up special in three decades, but he only stands up once, not including
his entry and exit. This isn’t an age thing or a laziness thing; it’s a style thing.
Cosby has been a sit-down comic for three decades, and this matches his M.O.
perfectly. The sight of America’s funny-cranky dad in a chair has always sent
the not too subliminal signal that you’re in for an evening of stories, as
opposed to jokes, so you might as well settle in (or settle down). Cosby looks
his age here, absolutely, and that means that his brand of humor no longer
seems amusingly incongruous. For most of his career, he was an old fogey
trapped in a younger man’s body, waving a cigar and gabbing about the good old
days while mostly avoiding politics, drugs, profanity, and other mainstays of
post-sixties stand-up. He still has that beguiling mix of conversational
smoothness and vaudevillian overreaction that made him a star in the sixties
and led to TV shows (I Spy, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, The Cosby Show),
feature films (Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again), and countless ads (he
was a pitchman for Ford, Del Monte, Jell-O, and Texas Instruments and earned a
place in Madison Avenue infamy by helping to launch New Coke). His
much-imitated facial tics—the tilted head, popped eyes, incredulously pursed
lips—have never seemed more natural than they do here. They’re the gestural
tools of a blustering grandfather or uncle, somebody who’s here to tell it like
it is and is a good enough storyteller that he knows you’ll keep listening even
as you wonder what the point is. But even when Cosby is going big, he goes big
in a small way. When overeager fans try to “help” him with his Comedy Central
performance, he rolls his eyes heavenward, like Grandpa telling the grandkids
that he’s not as helpless as they think—that, in fact, he’s still in charge,
damn it.
Far From Finished isn’t an
instant classic on the order of Bill Cosby: Himself or his stand-up albums
Revenge, Why Is There Air?, and Wonderfulness. It’s more like a pencil sketch
by a master painter or a late film by Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood: Which is
to say that it’s Old Man Art and that a big part of its pleasure comes from
seeing how economically the artist expresses himself and how intuitively he
reads and manipulates the room.
Cosby’s material has a long
white beard. It’s mostly bossy-wife-henpecked-husband material, the sort of
thing you’d see on a mediocre domestic sitcom or in a quasi-Neanderthal
newspaper strip such as “The Lockhorns.” But for a comic who was born in 1937
and always fetishized the Ozzie-and-Harriet model of domestic bliss, Cosby
mines this material with subtlety. He’s the unreliable narrator of his own fiction.
He gets big laughs portraying himself as a beleaguered, emasculated old man,
utterly dominated by his wife, Camille (who, Cosby repeatedly points out, is
not his “best friend,” although society requires him to say that she is). But
by his own admission, he’s a mediocre mate, forgetful and lazy and a poor
listener. In Cosby’s narrative, marriage is about trading pride for comfort;
when he resists his wife’s orders or endures her needling, it’s often because
he knows she’s right but has just enough male ego to refrain from rolling over
too quickly. The special is filled with metaphors of gamesmanship. Fencing is
invoked more than once. Ditto chess: “The queen moves anywhere she wants,
picking off people,” Cosby says at one point, “and what happens to the king?
He’s moving one square!”
Cosby’s great innovation was
to reject setup-punch-line rhythms and align stand-up with good old-fashioned
yarn-spinning. Other comedians got there first (notably Lenny Bruce onstage and
Bob Newhart on vinyl), and Cosby had a few near contemporaries who equaled his
inventiveness, including Richard Pryor and George Carlin, but there was
something quietly daring about his approach, which swapped the “Keep it
moving!” ethos for “Relax, we’ll get there eventually.”
“200 M.P.H.” is the greatest
example of this attitude: a 23-minute routine about a new car that takes up a
whole side of the 1968 album of the same name. Far From Finished has three
comparably protracted examples of slow-burn humor, including a bit in which
Cosby gets up in the middle of the night, triggers the security system in his
house, has a Newhart-worthy phone conversation with a security-company agent
who won’t deactivate the alarm until Cosby tells her his “code name,” and
confidently insists that he doesn’t have one. The fact that you can see where
the routine is headed doesn’t lessen its payoff; like the rest of Far From
Finished, it reminds us of the wellspring of Cosby’s career: his knack for
intimate, laid-back stand-up. And it might make us mourn all the stand-up
specials he didn’t tape because he was too busy revolutionizing the sitcom,
making a mint as a commercial pitchman, stinking up the big screen with Leonard
Part 6, lecturing young people on the virtues of pulling their pants up,
getting caught in various hypocrisies that belied his self-styled Father of the
Century image, and otherwise making us forget about his greatness as a
storyteller. We shouldn’t. Far From Finished reminds us why.
Far From Finished: Bill
Cosby. Comedy Central. November 23 at 7 p.m. and again on November 24 at 6 p.m.
Central Standard Time.
*This article originally
appeared in the November 25, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.
