Funny How Things Go: Reflections On Fallen Heroes

No word of a lie, two of my biggest child-hood heroes were Bill Cosby and Woody Allen.  In grade four my teacher played an  LP of Cosby's stand-up routine on the last day before summer break because  he had nothing more to teach us and it kept us quiet.  That's what got me into him; I think it was The Chickenheart story.  So I bought a copy of "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With" a week later (I was nine), and within a year I had collected all his LPs. Woody Allen of course I knew from his early movies, and later his New Yorker pieces.  He did stand-up a  bit as well, and I collected one or two of his albums, but it was never his thing.

They were, I thought at the time, the two funniest men who ever lived.  I still think that.  And Cosby's racial philosophy was intriguing.  And Allen once wrote the truest thing anyone has ever said about the world of post-secondary education: "Don't take anything where they make you read Beowulf."

But of course over the years it's been revealed that both of these men are monsters.  This is a little harder to process with Woody.  Cosby hasn't done anything in decades.  All the best bits of The Cosby Show were recycled from his stand-up routines.  The show's ideology didn't bother me so much as the fact that I could see most of the jokes coming.  But Woody still produces the occasional masterpiece.  Boycotting him would mean not watching Blue Jasmine, and everyone should watch that movie.

Funny, though, how afterwards you keep running into things that make you think you should have suspected.  Here's Bill Cosby from 1969:

PS. Something  I forgot in the post is that, due to those records being played in school, Millstream Elementary's official game when I was in grade five and six became Buck Buck. We had several teams. And though there was no Fat Albert, we did have "Big Ben".  This is a little school on Vancouver Island back in 1973 or something.  Buncha little white kids, playing a game Bill Cosby had told us about playing during in the 40s and 50s in the Projects of Philadelphia.