COMEDY REVIEW : A Master Storyteller Goes With the Flow

Bill Cosby was a little off his form Friday night at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. But who could blame him? A half-hour after his 8 o’clock performance was scheduled to begin, rows of people were still filing in. “Is everyone in the world on the 405?” he wondered aloud. “You got tickets for the 8:30 show?” he asked of a passer-by down front. “Look at that,” he said fondly to a man carrying a dinner tray of pretzels. “Please don’t sit near anybody, ‘cuz that gas kicks in.”

Furthermore, squadrons of moths found his cherry-red jogging suit especially appealing as it glowed like a bordello light on-stage in the gathering dusk. For a while, his remarks were punctuated with expulsions of “Pppht!” as he tried to keep them from flying in his mouth. “They’ll never do opera here ,” he said. Then, for a time, it appeared that the amphitheater was serving as a convenient sight reference for planes overflying John Wayne Airport.

Eventually Cosby realized it was going to be one of those nights. He decided, in effect, to shrug his shoulders and go with the flow.

“I don’t have much to talk to you about except where I am in life at 50,” he said, and that about summed up what we were to hear for the next two hours, interspersed with a couple of set pieces (including a visit-to-the-dentist sketch that was so vividly and painfully acted out that it generated a visceral tingle).

There’s a deceptive element about Cosby, the $100-million man, in that the folksy, avuncular tenor of his remarks completely disguises what must be one of the most raging engines of ambition in show business. The immense proliferation of the Cosby image through his TV show, records, movies, commercials, books and appearances (both as entertainer and spokesman for formal education) all point to an insatiable hunger to be seen and heard. Yet it’s almost miraculous that as a performer he seems a complete natural at striking up instant bonds of easy affection with his audiences and sharing intimacies that don’t spill into the indiscreet.

Cosby has always been an effective chronicler of himself through his uncanny ability to universalize his experience (at 50 and older, he observes, we begin to listen with our mouths open, as though the clearing of yet another orifice in the head will help our comprehension; or, conversely, when driving, we’ll turn off the car radio while searching for landmarks).

Unlike Danny Thomas, say, Cosby doesn’t need to remind us that he’s a wonderful storyteller. The gift is apparent, through his peculiar point of view, his true power of observation, his uncanny sense of the right detail and (a trait he shares with Richard Pryor) his atavistic skill at finding the animate soul in something and acting it out.

It seems perfectly natural that Cosby should continue wanting to reach out to live audiences long after he has any financial need to tour. There’s no star turn here or references to his many and varied Numero Uno pals in the flashy manner of show-biz noblesse oblige. He’s still refreshingly free of the superciliousness that characterizes the bulk of his younger stand-up followers. There are no 7-11 jokes, no airline jokes, no hostile jokes about women slickered by us under the rubric of ultimate female superiority. In fact, there are no jokes.

From a critical standpoint, one misses in Cosby the bright tension, the weather of Event that surrounds the appearance of a great performer. If that was even more unapparent than usual Friday, so was the element of self-importance that has occasionally crept into the Cosby style over the years. Even on an off night he was what he’s been at his most endearing: a man who suffers the mysteries and mortifications of the flesh--which, as he tells us, don’t end with adolescence but instead multiply with age--while continuously subject to the rude shocks of experience. Just like the rest of us.

That’s the kind of assent you can only get in live performance, and it may be why he continues to nurture the bond. The most masterful element in Cosby’s skill as a storyteller is the tacit revelation that life isn’t funny because you can find things to joke about in it; it’s funny because it’s so fundamentally strange. If we’re alone in the dark, Cosby seems to say, we’re at least alone together, urging us to hear the ancient art of the tale, in whose tradition he remains a noble practitioner.