LITTLE ROCK — Bill Cosby — comedian, producer, author, actor — is pleased that his Little Rock gig this Sunday is a matinee.
“Three in the afternoon — that’s very nice,” he says. “And it’s very comfortable, too. ’Cause people can come out of there and it’s still daylight. Some of my people, who may be in their 70s, 80s — I’ll be 75 in July — that night driving is a problem.
“And it still leaves young people some wiggle room to laugh and then come out of there and continue on to whatever events they want to do late that night.”
Audiences of whatever age can count on Cosby’s nearly two-hour show to be material they haven’t heard before.
In his Little Rock visits in 1997 and 2008, Cosby did two 90-minute shows, and not only didn’t repeat himself between one show and the other, but all of it was new stuff — with the exception of the second-show closer, a longtime favorite bit about a visit to the dentist and the negative side effects of Novocain.
So will this Sunday’s show in fact be completely new?
“You won’t get the dentist as the finale,” he admits.
Audiences, of course, are familiar with that bit, as well as many others, from the recordings Cosby made for Warner Bros. in the 1960s (Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow ... Right, Why Is There Air?, Wonderfulness, 200 M.P.H. and To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With, all of which Warner re-released on CD a couple of years ago). Many listeners can repeat them by heart.
“Yeah, but you know, that’s a performance piece,” he says of the dentist sketch. “They really come to hear that, and to see it, because many people can’t do that, they can’t do the rubber bottom lip,” he says.
“Now, ‘Noah’ was a different thing, because ‘Noah’ was wordfor-word, note-for-note, and they can move their lips to it.
“In my career, 49 years, I’ve always moved pieces, like on a conveyor belt, because even I get tired of them. And the other philosophy is, if I stay with a piece long enough, people will identify strongly and ... I can become human with it and begin to become jealous of it.”
Which prompted Cosby to tell the story of the drunk exventriloquist who lived above the Greenwich Village coffeehouse where Cosby got his first comedy job, who had gotten so jealous of his dummy “that he beat it up in front of an audience. People thought it was an act. This guy actually quit the business to keep this thing from getting the laughs.”
“You can’t keep doing ‘Noah,’” he explains. “You’ve got to move on. And I’ve said this many times to audiences when they called out, ‘Do the so-forth and so-on.’ And I really feel sorry for them, but I’ve said, ‘I don’t remember it,’ which is true. However, you’re getting the same writer and the same performer and that ought to be good enough.”
Cosby is the author of several books, including many on family relationships — Fatherhood; Time Flies; Love and Marriage and Childhood; Friends of a Feather: One of Life’s Little Fables, with illustrations by his daughter Erika (another of Cosby’s five children, Erinn, took the photos that appear with this story); and I Am What I Ate … and I’m Frightened!!!.
His most recent, I Didn’t Ask to Be Born, But I’m Glad I Was, has been on shelves since Nov. 1 and hit the New York Times best-seller list.
“There’s a couple of just really very, very wonderful pieces there,” he says. “The one about the kids and the phone calls from three of Santa’s helpers, something that I probably wouldn’t turn out [on stage] unless it was a [very] special occasion, but thanks to books I can write it and read it and have a ball with it.
“It’s the grandchildren being called by me to the phone because it’s one of Santa’s helpers, Christmas Eve. The transformation, the behavior, how these kids know who’s calling, and they straighten up.
“Then there’s a piece dedicated to our time, that old-fashioned way of thinking about your maleness and dating and what girls would allow you to do, and what they would not allow you to do, according to what they were taught at home.
“And then there’s the wonderful piece about, if the Native Americans knew back then what they know today, how different the United States of America would be.”
In 2009, Cosby received the 12th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, but he slyly resists any comparison.
“Eventually,” he says, “I think I got Mark beat in performance. I don’t have him beat in writing. That’s a challenge that I smile and walk away from.”
Bill Cosby
3 p.m. Sunday, Robinson Center Music Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock
Tickets: $27-$72 plus handling fees
(501) 244-8800, (800) 982-2787
ticketmaster.com
Weekend, Pages 35 on 03/29/2012