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This is an impressive 4-part documentary on Showtime. I listened to his comedy records as a kid, but never watched him much on TV. There is a racial angle of course - how interesting that it took a black, male comic talking about him on stage to catapult the story into everyday consciousness. But it's our misogynistic culture that stands out. "America's dad has a rape problem."
"Beyond tracing these contradictory ideas, Bell excavates Cosby’s career to show what we had missed all along. When the talking heads react to footage of Cosby delivering his infamous “Spanish fly” routine, about spiking women’s drinks, we learn that he first told the bit in the 1960s and was still telling it in the ’90s (“Cosby, from almost day one, was telling us that he was willing to — and didn’t think anything was strange about — putting things in women’s drinks,” reacts academic Marc Lamont Hill).
Bell also plays his interview subjects a clip of The Cosby Show where Dr. Huxtable deviously explains how people “get all huggy-buggy” after eating his homemade barbecue sauce. Bell is in effect asking us to consider that perhaps Cosby has been giving us glimpses into who he has always been all along. It unsettles the notion that the Cosby story is some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tension. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb drives home the point: “You could make the case that it was all Mr. Hyde.”"
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"Beyond tracing these contradictory ideas, Bell excavates Cosby’s career to show what we had missed all along. When the talking heads react to footage of Cosby delivering his infamous “Spanish fly” routine, about spiking women’s drinks, we learn that he first told the bit in the 1960s and was still telling it in the ’90s (“Cosby, from almost day one, was telling us that he was willing to — and didn’t think anything was strange about — putting things in women’s drinks,” reacts academic Marc Lamont Hill).
Bell also plays his interview subjects a clip of The Cosby Show where Dr. Huxtable deviously explains how people “get all huggy-buggy” after eating his homemade barbecue sauce. Bell is in effect asking us to consider that perhaps Cosby has been giving us glimpses into who he has always been all along. It unsettles the notion that the Cosby story is some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tension. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb drives home the point: “You could make the case that it was all Mr. Hyde.”"
Link