Free-Ranging Bill Cosby Finds All the Right Notes

One of Bill Cosby’s longtime passions is jazz, and in concert he performs with the same loose artistry of a jazz great, fooling around with ideas, usually finding the right notes.

Saturday night, in the first of two shows at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Cosby riffed on the King James Bible, Adam and Eve, his childhood in the Philadelphia projects, and his less-than-distinguished career as a math student in a nearly 90-minute performance that reaffirmed his status as one of the great clean comics of his time.

Of course, at 60, Cosby is less a comedian than an icon--America’s dad. The fatherly image has apparently survived Cosby’s horrific 1997: first, the murder of his son, Ennis (“Hello, Friend” is the name of Cosby’s latest live show, an ode to Ennis, who would often greet his dad with that salutation), and then a lawsuit brought against him by Autumn Jackson, who claimed to be his daughter (she was subsequently found guilty of trying to extort $40 million from the star).

Onstage, Cosby plays the same world-weary patriarch he has for a decade and a half on television--often indignant or angry, but never losing that essential warm and fuzzy glow.

Cosby has this ability to create an instant rapport with his audience, to make you feel as though you’ve happened upon him holding court at his kitchen table. There he is, thumbing through the King James Bible, wondering what’s up with all the bad grammar, these “he hims” and “he thems.” And don’t get him started on Adam, of Adam and Eve fame.

“The character development of Adam is pitiful,” Cosby remarked in his trademark cranky deadpan. After all, what poor excuse for a man, when asked by God about the forbidden fruit, would point to Eve and say, “She did it”?

The King James Bible segment of Cosby’s show lasted a good 20 minutes. As with any Cosby routine, the jokes don’t come in bang-bang fashion. Rather, they creep up on you amid the lulls and asides in the natural course of Cosby’s folksy approach.

But that’s not to say there isn’t a structure to his storytelling, a payoff.

Though he went on to earn his college degree at Temple University on a track scholarship, Cosby was more cutup than student in the early years. And the funniest and most endearing story he told Saturday night involved his relationship with his grammar school math teacher, “who came all the way from Russia just to make my life miserable.”

By Cosby’s account, he had no use for math. There was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but after that everything was just so much wasted time. To the math problem “If A over B equals C over D, what is Y?” the young Cosby would answer, “Too far away.”

But in Cosby’s routines, as in life, things have a way of being cyclical. And so years after he had forsaken math for good, Cosby, now in college and studying to be a physical education teacher, found himself having to teach geometry in a Philadelphia public school. And who was his class mentor?

The same teacher whose life he had made so miserable all those years ago, of course. It’s the kind of cute, safely funny story Cosby employs, and it explains why he continues to be such a huge draw, even at Saturday night’s price of $90 a ticket.

For while many comedians rely on the scandalous, the prurient and the generally unpleasant aspects of life, Cosby can deliver an evening of PG-rated comedy, free of anything offensive or topical or controversial. And he’ll still manage to say the darndest things.