Portraying a Curmudgeon Isn’t for Him

America honored Bill Cosby long before the Kennedy Center got around to it. He had already been clasped securely to its bosom, one of the best-loved entertainers of his time. And his time’s clearly not over.

On Dec. 6, however, just to make it official, Cosby was named one of this year’s winners of the Kennedy Center Honors in a ceremony to air as a special on CBS on Dec. 30.

“It was shocking to read that I was the youngest of this year’s winners at 61,” says Cosby with a smile and a puff on a fat Macanudo. “I do think I’m going to enjoy mine more than many of the past winners who sort of just couldn’t do it anymore. But then again, their body of work is complete.”

He also says he is happy to get the award “while the mind is still clear and I’m without a cane and in control of my continence.”

It’s about a week before the ceremony and Cosby is sitting in his cozy, homey office at Kaufman-Astoria Studios on Long Island, where he tapes his new CBS comedy series “Cosby.” It airs Monday nights and earns good ratings. Cosby isn’t used to good ratings, however, but great ones, at least for a sitcom in which he stars.

“The Cosby Show,” NBC’s huge hit of the ‘80s, sometimes earned 50 shares in the Nielsen ratings. A share is a percentage of TV sets turned on at a given time. On Thursday nights at 8, as many as half the homes watching TV were tuned to Cosby’s loving and life-affirming show about the Huxtable family of New York, the first fully realized African American family on TV.

By contrast, Cosby’s new CBS series gets a 14 or 15 share, something that seems to distress Cosby considerably. When football season ends next month, the ratings will go up, because many of the male viewers watching ABC’s “Monday Night Football” will switch to Cosby.

“Cosby” earned high ratings when it premiered in 1996, but then viewers began jumping ship. The problem was that the series was adapted from a British show about a cranky misanthrope. Cosby now realizes that this is not the way the American audience wants to see him.

“I really ought to have known better from 36 years of going out doing stand-up,” Cosby says. “After doing ‘You Bet Your Life’ and then ‘The Cosby Mysteries,’ both shows I loved”--but which flopped--”and then to come in with this one when there is still a picture in most people’s minds of the Huxtables and their kids, et cetera, et cetera, and to open this series with this English feel and the way the English fellow could do it, I think we just literally turned off folks that did not want Bill Cosby to do that.

“You could maybe have put in an actor that nobody knew or maybe given Dabney Coleman his eighth attempt at being a curmudgeon, but not me. And so they went away. Quickly. I think that when I behave as I did in the first year, it turns an awful lot of people off. They don’t want to see Bill Cosby, even if it’s funny, chewing out people. They expect me to have more patience.

“Now we’re a 14 and struggling. I would love to get to a 17 by the end of the season.” Even if he doesn’t, CBS is bound to renew “Cosby” for another season. It’s by no means a failure; in fact, it beats the other entertainment shows opposite it.

“Cosby” will go on. Cosby wants it to.

“Yes, I do. This is as wonderful as it gets without me going into debt,” he says. “What we’re doing is storytelling and we’re not afraid to take the joke out and let the character’s voice cause the laugh or the emotion. And I tell you, I sleep very, very well. It’s all very, very comfortable for me.”

He praises his co-stars and others who work on the show, and he thinks it’s better than the ratings indicated. He doesn’t just star, either. He runs the whole shebang, directing actors in rehearsals, rewriting dialogue (or letting them rewrite it), running around the set like a paunchy football coach in his huge Adidas and sweatpants.

Everybody at the network pretty much leaves Cosby alone, he says, and one would assume that considering his stature--professional as well as physical--he would always get his own way. But he suggests that on “Cosby Mysteries” and other shows this was not the case, and he sounds as though he has been through his share of network wars.

“Television is definitely a form of art and entertainment that will put something on knowing that it’s bad,” he says. “Knowing that it’s bad! They say, ‘It’s Oct. 13 and we’ve got to have it.’ ‘But it’s terrible.’ ‘Look, give it to us.’ And they put it on and it’s awful. With movies at least they can hold onto it, they can bury it, they can send it to Trinidad and let it gather moss or not play it at all. But in television you can rest assured, if they shoot it, you will see it.”

* “Cosby” airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on CBS.