For decades, Cosby was America’s ideal dad. His real life was more complicated. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY MILTON H. GREENE / ARCHIVE IMAGES
I consider myself a decent fan of Bill Cosby’s, but it’s in the fond-childhood-memories-kind of way because of re-runs of “The Cosby Show,” which I watched as a kid. I don’t remember his stand-up (before my time), and his ‘clean,’ storytelling type of stand up wasn’t exactly my cup for tea. Yet for his TV shows, it worked well.
Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, however, were my thing. Wild and potty mouthed, they made shitty days something to forget and laugh at. Still, as a comedy fan, I find him to be extremely important in the history of show business, African American history, and comedy, in the United States. And, truth be told, his recent notoriety for issuing respectability politics-laced tirades to (and about) the Black community, piques my interest. Why does he feel this way? What’s his deal?
This New Yorker piece gives great insight to a man I’ll always associated with Jell-O Pudding Pops. But this excerpt is THE BEST. I can hear Pryor’s voice and delivery(via an impeccable Murphy impression) as if I were right there:
In the 1987 concert movie “Raw,” Eddie Murphy told a story about Cosby calling him up and urging him to use less profanity in his act, for the sake of his young fans, including Cosby’s own son. Murphy recalled being so offended that he telephoned Richard Pryor, who offered some defiantly un-Cosby-like advice: “The next time the motherfucker calls, tell him I said suck my dick.”
Excerpt from “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” by Roz Chast of the New Yorker.
“I was just talking to somebody yesterday who said the worst thing for a parent is to have a child who’s a writer.” — New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast.
I would like to write about my parents.
I wrote a couple of columns about my father’s Parkinson’s when I was a newspaper reporter for the Home News Tribune,and I’ve blogged about his illness on this blog once or twice. But I would like to someday write stories about them, their childhoods, and especially, how my dad was pre-Parkinson’s.
And as for my mother, that’s more complicated.
I’ve never been the super close daughter (the type to talk about every single detail with her mom) that she was with her mother. (My grandmother is still alive, but she has Alzheimer’s, which means my mother has lost, in essence, her best friend.) Add in the fact that she is stressed because she’s my father’s full-time caregiver, and it’s even more complicated.
Thankfully, our relationship is a bit better (much less bickering) since I’ve lived on my own (after a separation and subsequent divorce that she didn’t agree with at first) but, like all things, it could be better.
I have some things to work out, or talk about (?), in order to make that happen. And then I hope to write about them more, especially my mother, since she’s not very open about her feelings (hey, maybe we are alike, after all!) because as the most hardworking immigrants I know, my parents have some interesting stories that deserve some pixels on the Internet.
“The longtime New Yorker cartoonist is an only child and became the sole caretaker for her parents, George and Elizabeth Chast, when they reached old age. In her new, illustrated memoir — Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?(Bloomsbury USA, 2014) — Chast mixes the humor with the heartache. It’s about the last years of her parents’ lives and her relationship with them as their child and conflicted caretaker.
“They never had what’s known these days as ‘The Talk’ — an acknowledgement that their deaths were inevitable. As a result, Chast says, everyone was in denial and actively avoided the subject, even as it was staring them squarely in the face.”
“Chast’s parents — who were both born in 1912 — lived independently in Brooklyn up until their early 90s. Things started to go downhill in 2005 when her mother fell off a step stool at age 93. ‘She was in bed for a few days, and it was clear that what was going on was more than the fall off the ladder,’ Chast recalls. ‘That was the beginning of their sort of slide into the next part of old age — you know, the last chapters.'”
My parents are in their late 60s, early 70s. I can’t imagine it getting to this point Chast describes, but I guess my brothers and I should prepare ourselves sooner rather than later. And today, after reading this story in The New York Times, about a man who is 111 years old, I agree wholeheartedly with Chast:
“When people talk about extending the human lifespan to 120 it bothers Roz Chast. ‘That upsets me for a lot of reasons,’ she tells NPR’s Melissa Block. ‘I feel like these are people who don’t really know anybody over 95.’ The reality of old age, she says, is that ‘people are not in good shape, and everything is falling apart.'”
Though my parents aren’t in their 90s, my father has a chronic disease that renders him pretty immobile, and so, I too, can’t imagine wanting to live to 111. (God bless this man who has, though!)
Listen to the entire interview with Roz Chast here, and read an excerpt from her illustrated memoir via The New Yorker.
Scene By Gina 