BY JOHN BERGER / jberger@staradvertiser.com
Your wife is not your “friend,” let alone your “best friend.” If she were, you could talk to her the way you talk to your friends — but you can’t.
Bill Cosby explored that proposition and proved his point in emphatic style last night as he entertained an SRO crowd for almost two hours in the Blaisdell Concert Hall. Counting the five minutes of video clips that opened the show — highlight moments of Cosby’s interviews with kids, highlight moments of Cosby’s interviews with couples — it was a solid hour-and-50-minutes of clean, insightful, hilarious entertainment.
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Bill Cosby performs at the Blaisdell Concert Hall on Saturday, March 30. (Photo by James Garrett, Special to the Star-Advertiser)
Take note, young comics and wannabe-comics, Cosby did a show that clocked in at twice the length of many comics’ sets, and had the crowd roaring with laughter throughout the evening, without even once using the “F-word” or the “S-word” or any of the other standard “urban” obscenities. Instead of using the “four-letter” and “six-letter” and “12-letter” words that so many comics rely on Cosby used his skill as character actor to create a cavalcade of characters that percolated through his storytelling — love-sick men, a cunning resident of Maui, angry parents, two seven-year-old boys aghast and sickened by the thought of touching tongues with a girl, and, of course, his wife of 49 years.
Cosby started with some made-in-Hawaii material — his discovery while trying to get some badly needed sleep that the beachfront hotel he was staying at had a very loud luau show, his impressions of Hawaiian music, the reason he wasn’t trying to learn any Hawaiian vocabulary during his stay, and his discovery that people on Maui don’t tell unsuspecting visitors like himself how cold it gets on Haleakala at night.
Elaborately garnished tourist hotel drinks were decried and the traditional tourist-market muumuu was scrutinized. “What do you do with them when you get home to Minnesota?,” he asked, although he added that people look just as silly wearing one of those over-sized made-for-tourists sombreros on the plane home from Mexico.
Cosby’s skills as an actor and physical comedian came into play as he narrated the experience of secretly watching a friend’s older brother kissing a girl — Cosby portrayed himself at age seven, his friend, his friend’s brother and the girl. Physicality was also key to a sketch about the experiences of several 13-year-olds playing Spin the Bottle. The suspense built as Cosby described how he’d tried to keep his 13-year-old cool when a lucky spin set him up to kiss the girl of his dreams — as we’ve all known for decades, Cosby is a master storyteller.
Other stories covered familiar subjects, the old-time 1940s-vintage parental discipline he grew up with, for example. The gist of that was likely familiar material for some, but as always Cosby’s insights and observations transcended generations — and racial lines as well.
Cosby also gave the crowd some ideas to consider on the way home. For instance, why does the street-knowledge phrase “What goes around, comes around” only seem to be used when saying that sooner or later something bad is going to happen to someone who’s done someone wrong? Can’t good deeds also come around back as a reward to people who do something good?
And, think about this if you’re a man in a live-in relationship, who decided which side of the bed is your side of the bed? Or, how many drawers you get to use out of the total number available.
“I have one drawer left,” Cosby said. “I don’t know where it is, but I’m thankful to have it!”
Thanks, Bill, for another entertaining and insight-filled night of comedy at the Blaisdell.
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John Berger has been a mainstay in the local entertainment scene for more than 40 years. Contact him via email at jberger@staradvertiser.com.