Thank you for the wonderful Cosby Concert report Tatia. I’m glad he’s still out there doing what he does. I’ve been revisiting his early comedy albums for the first time in many years. He released eight comedy LPs for the Warner Brothers label between about 1963 and 1969:
Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow Right!
I Started Out As A Child
Why Is There Air?
Wonderfulness
Revenge
To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With
200 M.P.H.
It’s True! It’s True!
My brother and I discovered him via “Wonderfulness” (which led, in time, to me checking out I Spy) and eventually we picked up the earlier ones, and the later ones as they came out. I remember feeling at the time that the quality began to drop off after “Revenge”. His style did evolve. In the “Very Funny Fellow Right” album he tackles more conventional comedy subjects (in his unique style of course). Then he began using his own childhood as a source of material, and then his wife and his own small children. I think what I felt then was that his earlier stuff was denser, and more tightly scripted, and with time he got looser and more improvisational. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do recall being disappointed with the last couple of Warner Brothers releases. He then switched over to the Universal City Records (UNI) label. We picked up the first couple of those:
‘Live’ At Madison Square Garden
When I Was A Kid
We were a bit under whelmed by these and it sort of ended the love affair. What may be a key difference between the early albums and the later ones is that the early ones were performed in smaller clubs and were heavily edited. Often you can hear the edits. So I think things were tightened up a bit. The later ones tend to be from large venues and are closer to documenting the actual concert experience. The thing that’s missing from all these albums is the physical side to his humor. We’re only getting half the story. Sometimes the audience laughs and he hasn’t said anything. You have to imagine what he’s doing by selecting from the library of Cosby expressions and attitudes stored in your head. In my current revisit I’m only up to “Russell” and I liked it quite a bit. So we’ll see. I may end up strongly disagreeing with my 16 year old self (I'm sorry to report that, in general, he didn’t know a hell of a lot!). One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the stuff on these albums sounds like it could have just been recorded. There is very little that sounds dated. The humor is timeless.
Jimmy
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