Dr. William 'Bill' Cosby: Educator, Activist, Comedian, Actor

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Places of Scholarly Work, Scholarly Celebrations

Dr. William H. Cosby was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is one of four sons born to Anna Pearl (née Hite), a maid, and William Henry Cosby, Sr., a cook for the U.S. Navy. During much of his early childhood, Cosby’s father was away in the U.S. armed forces and spent several years fighting in World War II. As a student, he described himself as a class clown. Cosby was the captain of the baseball and track and field teams at Mary Channing Wister Elementary School in Philadelphia, as well as the class president. Early on, though, teachers noted his propensity for clowning around rather than studying.

At Fitz Simmons Junior High, Cosby began acting in plays as well as continuing his devotion to playing sports. He went on to Central High School, an academically challenging magnet school, but his full schedule of playing football, basketball, baseball, and running track made it hard for him. In addition, Cosby was working before and after school, selling produce, shining shoes, and stocking shelves at a supermarket to help out the family. He transferred to Germantown High School, but failed the tenth grade. Instead of repeating, he got a job as an apprentice at a shoe repair shop, which he liked, but could not see himself doing the rest of his life. Subsequently, he joined the Navy, serving at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

Omega Psi Phi

While serving in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman for four years, Cosby worked in physical therapy with some seriously injured Korean War casualties, which helped him discover what was important to him. Then he immediately realized the need for an education, and finished his equivalency diploma via correspondence courses. He then won a track and field scholarship to Philadelphia’s Temple University in 1961-62, and studied physical education while running track and playing fullback on the football team. Cosby also joined the school’s chapter of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Cosby loved humor and he called himself the class clown. Even as he progressed through his undergraduate studies, Cosby had continued to hone his talent for humor, joking with fellow enlistees in the service and then with college friends. When he began bar tending at the Cellar, a club in Philadelphia, to earn money, he became fully aware of his ability to make people laugh. He worked his customers and saw his tips increase, then ventured on to the stage.

Cosby left Temple to pursue a career in comedy, though he would return to collegiate studies in the 1970s. He lined up gigs at clubs in Philadelphia and soon was off to New York City, where he appeared at the Gaslight Cafe starting in 1962. He lined up dates in Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., among others. He received national exposure on NBC’s The Tonight Show in the summer of 1963 and released Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right!, the first of a series of popular comedy albums in 1964.

While many comics were using the growing freedom of that decade to explore controversial, sometimes risqué material, Cosby was making his reputation with humorous recollections of his childhood. Many Americans wondered about the absence of race as a topic in Cosby’s stories. As Cosby’s success grew he had to defend his choice of material regularly; as he argued, “A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I see it too.’ Okay. He’s white. I’m Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I’m doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”

I Spy

I Spy

In 1965, Cosby achieved a first for African-Americans when he co-starred with Robert Culp in I Spy, an adventure show in the espionage genre inspired by the James Bond films. Cosby’s presence as the first black star of a dramatic television series made I Spy unique. At first, Cosby and NBC executives were concerned that some affiliates might be unwilling to carry the series. At the beginning of the 1965 season, however, only four stations—in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama—declined the show. But the rest of the country was taken with the show’s exotic locales and the authentic chemistry of the stars, and it became one of the ratings hits of that television season. I Spy finished among the twenty most-watched shows that year, and Cosby was honored with three consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Although ostensibly focused on Culp’s character, the show had clearly become a vehicle for his co-star.

Yet throughout the series’ three-year run Cosby was repeatedly confronted with the question of race. For him it was enough that I Spy portrayed two men who worked as equals despite their different races; but critics took the show to task for not having a black character engage the racial issues that inflamed the country at that time. Cosby was relieved when the series ended, enabling him to concentrate on his family and to return to live performing.

During the run of the series, Cosby continued to do stand-up comedy performances and released a half-dozen record albums. He also began to dabble in singing, recording Silver Throat: Bill Cosby Sings in 1967, which provided him with a hit single with his recording of “Li’l Ole Man“. He would record several more musical albums into the early 1970s, but his recordings continued to be primarily of his stand-up comedy work.

Fat Albert, The Bill Cosby Show, and the 1970s

The Electric Company circa 1970s

He still pursued a variety of television projects: as a regular guest host on The Tonight Show and the star of an annual special for NBC. He returned with another series in 1969, The Bill Cosby Show, a situation comedy that ran for two seasons. Cosby played a physical education teacher at a Los Angeles high school (he had actually majored in physical education at Temple University); while only a modest critical success, the show was a ratings hit, finishing eleventh in its first season.

After The Bill Cosby Show left the air, Cosby returned to his education. He began graduate work at the University of Massachusetts, qualifying under a special program that allowed for the admission of students who had not completed their bachelor’s degrees, but who had had a significant impact on society and/or their communities through their careers. This professional interest led to his involvement in the PBS series The Electric Company, for which he recorded several segments teaching reading skills to young children.

In 1972, Cosby received an MA from the University of Massachusetts and was also back in prime time with a variety series, The New Bill Cosby Show. However, this time he met with poor ratings, and the show lasted only a season. More successful was a Saturday morning show, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, hosted by Cosby and based on his own childhood, running from 1972 to 1979, then from 1979 to 1984 as The New Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Some schools used the program as a teaching tool, and Cosby himself wrote his dissertation on it in order to obtain his doctorate, also from the University of Massachusetts, in Education in 1976. His dissertation was entitled, “An Integration of the Visual Media Via ‘Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids’ Into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning“. Subsequently, Temple University, where Cosby had begun but never finished his undergraduate studies, would grant him his bachelor’s degree on the basis of “life experience”.

Also during the 1970s, Cosby and other African American actors, including Sidney Poitier, joined forces to make some successful comedy films that countered the violent “blaxploitation” films of the era. Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975) were generally praised, but much of Cosby’s film work has fallen flat. Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976) costarring Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel; A Piece of the Action, with Poitier; and California Suite, a compilation of four Neil Simon plays, were all panned. In addition, Cos (1976) an hour-long variety show featuring puppets, sketches, and musical numbers, was canceled within the year. Cosby was also a regular on children’s public television programs starting in the 70′s, hosting the “Picture Pages” segments that lasted into the early 80s.

The Cosby Show
Cosby’s greatest television success came in September, 1984 with the debut of The Cosby Show. The program aired weekly on NBC and went on to become the highest ranking sitcom of all time. For Cosby, the new situation comedy was a response to the increasingly violent and vulgar fare the networks usually offered. Cosby is an advocate for humor that is both humorous and family-oriented. He insisted on and received total creative control of the series, and he was involved in every aspect of the series. Not surprisingly, the show had parallels to Cosby’s actual family life: like the characters Cliff and Claire Huxtable, Cosby and his wife Camille were college educated, financially successful, and had five children. Essentially a throwback to the wholesome family situation comedy, The Cosby Show was unprecedented in its portrayal of an intelligent, affluent, nonstereotypical African-American family.

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….And the rest is history! Or we could write a very long post (yup, longer than this one already is). Here is a more extensive bio from Bill Cosby’s website. Or, view an interactive version (with sound clips, also from his website):

Over the years, Bill Cosby received a great amount of awards, honors, and honorary degrees – all of which can be reviewed on his wikipedia entry (where this information was obtained).

At 72, Dr. Cosby is still active and has recently released a rap album called The Cosnarati. More information about him and the album can be found on his personal website – www.billcosby.com.

An Invitation from Bill Cosby and The Cosnarati from Bill Cosby on Vimeo.

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