In October 2014, comedian Hannibal Buress was doing an independent gathering in Philadelphia and decided to do a riff about Bill Cosby which he tried on a handful of sets that year. What was different was that this time, someone in the audience pulled out their phone to take a picture of them.
“Bill Cosby has an overt personality as the worst old black smuggler I hate,” Buress says in the video. “He was on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, niggers! I was on TV in the 80s. I can talk to you because I had a hit sitcom! ‘ Yes, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so let’s take it down a few notch. ‘I don’t curse on stage!’ Yes, yes, but you are a rapist, so…”
At that time, Cosby, comedy legend known as “America’s Dad”, once brought attention to his patronizing lectures aimed at Black youth, specifically Black youth, for behaviors he considered unsightly and stereotypically damaging to his image. their culture. The audience’s reaction to Buress’ jest was a mixture of giggles and gasps of astonishment.
“That’s sad,” Buress continued. “If you don’t know about it, trust me. When you leave here, Google ‘rape Bill Cosby.’ It’s not fun. That damn has more results than ‘Hannibal Buress.’
The idea of a bit, apparently, of Cosby’s shame is hypocritical and out of touch with his own behavior. “I can make you talk a lot of ‘assholes’ about Bill Cosby: He himself If you’re not a rapist,” Buress added.
The point is, at the time, people didn’t call Cosby a rapist. At least, not on the scale it is now, after dozens of women have come forward with stories of sexual assault over Cosby’s entire career, the performer herself admitted in a deposition that he sedated the women he wanted to have sex with, and that he was ultimately found guilty of sexual assault.
Footage from Buress’ 2014 scene was leaked online, where it was posted on YouTube, shared on social media, and covered by most major media news outlets. With a joke, the dominos would eventually lead to Cosby’s disputable death—he release from prison and his beliefs turned upside down – began to decline.
The phenomenon of the Hannibal Buress series is the starting point for the final episode of We need to talk about CosbyNew showtime archives from W. Kamau Bell. Over the course of four episodes, the series meticulously outlines Cosby’s historical career and his undeniable role in fundamentally changing American society and culture toward Blacks. But inside that cultural study are graphic details of the attacks alleged by his survivors and his predatory behavior present at every landmark on the road to building the legacy. that product.
We need to talk about CosbyThe final episode aired on Sunday night, but the series deserves much more talk and has a much more intense cultural footprint than the one made last month. Maybe by revisiting the Buress spark plug set it could happen. Because like We need to talk about Cosby just to be clear, everything that happens after that might be due to that set — but not to that set at all.
“Most of us didn’t struggle with it back then,” Bell said in his narration in We need to talk about Cosby. “Bill Cosby is still the father of America. He is still the angry grandfather of black America. But something about Hannibal’s joke, plus the grainy cell phone footage, plus the new age of social media, exploded.”
Marc Lamont Hill, a professor at Temple University, explains that over the years, there have been “rumors and rumors” about Cosby’s actions — so Buress instructs his audience to simply Google — but they always fail.
Some aspects of today’s popular culture that often emerge regarding Cosby’s public secrecy were years before Buress went viral. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it in 2005 on Saturday night live. A year 2009 episode of 30 Rock when he saw Tracy Morgan’s character say, “Bill Cosby, you’re so nervous to get on the phone with me after what you did to my aunt Paulette! 1971. Cincinnati. She’s a cocktail waitress with droopy eyes! ”
“For whatever reason, when Hannibal Buress mentioned Bill Cosby and talked about this thing, it exploded. “And suddenly this is no longer a rumbling below ground. This is now a full blown explosion that everyone has to deal with. (The episode then cuts in with Cosby’s former TV co-star, Doug E. Doug, who expresses his shock after seeing the video: “I was like, what the hell is he talking about? A rapist?!”)
In 2014, around the time the video was recorded, NBC announced that they were working on a new family sitcom with Cosby that would herald his big return to primetime television. sane — even though his rape allegations went viral on the internet and even made headlines Today shown, with Matt Lauer (oy…) interviewing a whistleblower.
That is How powerful institutions have earned so little credibility have paid for the clear, detailed and heartbreaking stories from women who have gone before. As critic and TV reporter Maureen Ryan puts it in the documentary, “If a lot of news pieces get out in the media and you still make that damn deal, what kind of monster are you? “
That’s why so much credit was supposed to be Buress’ joke, it suddenly spread like wildfire. “It’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube,” said Hill. “And suddenly what could have been a blip is now a media scandal rife.” Why such a heated reaction? Equal Boston GlobeRenée Graham’s explains, “It puts deception in his sanctity. How dare you criticize anyone else? Yes, my pants may sag, but I didn’t rape anyone. ”
Buress has insisted for years that none of this was intentional, always squirming whenever someone mentions that he is “the man who destroyed Bill Cosby’s career.” That’s fair, especially because, as Bell explains while adding context to the whole story, Buress’s set didn’t exactly do that.
“Many people remember Hannibal’s joke as what brought Bill Cosby down,” Bell said. “But that’s not true. Bill Cosby is still doing Bill Cosby’s things. Just a few weeks later, Bill and Camille [Cosby, his wife] was promoting an exhibit of their art at the Smithsonian, like nothing strange was going on. And there are plenty of interviews about their art like it’s business as usual. ”
We need to talk about Cosby shows raw footage of a journalist trying to question Cosby and his wife about the attention triggered by Buress’ video. Not only did they say they wouldn’t talk about it, they also bullied the reporter and his producer into never airing footage in which the question was raised.
What happened, however, was that the attention to Burres’ jokes set the stage for accusers to bring their stories back to the public.
A month after Buress was established, Barbara Bowman wrote a column for washington articles titled, “Bill Cosby Raped Me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story? Sub-headline: “Only when a comedian calls Cosby a rapist will the accusation be grounded.”
Bowman was interviewed at We need to talk about Cosby and said, “At that particular moment, it was like a perfect storm. It was an opportunity for me to tell my story.” Then came the avalanche. In the weeks and months that followed, dozens of other women showed up. They are unpredictable. Cosby’s behavior was unpredictable. In July 2015, New York The magazine published a cover featuring 35 people denounced him. That number will eventually grow to more than 60.
That is real power. As Bell said, “Although Hannibal’s joke got everyone talking, it was Barbara Bowman’s advice that kept the other survivors moving.”
