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Rating:  -
Bill Cosby is awesome! He talks about drinking, dentist visits, childbirth, and raising children. Something to watch with the whole family. My 6yr old loves it! Especially the part about the chocolate cake. We still laugh every time.
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Once again Bill Cosby's humor is great for the whole family to listen to and to relate to as well.
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I have seen parts of this show on TV for years and waited til I could find it on DVD to watch the entire show. Let me tell you no matter how many times you see it, this show is hilarious! This DVD arrived quickly and in perfect condition. *****
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Himself (Bill Cosby, 1983)
Back when it originally came out, I saw Himself so many times it's one of the few movies where I've actually lost count of the number of times I've seen it. I also own the album, and wore out two or three copies of it on cassette in the eighties. (Thank heaven for the CD!) I DVRed it from one of the commercial-free channels a few months ago and saved it to watch with my daughter recently; she's about the same age now I was when I first saw it, so it seemed a natural. My daughter's one of those kids who laughs at comedies, but is horrified of being seen to like things that won't be seen as cool (for example, she goes into fits of giggling when I sit her down in front of an episode of Are You Being Served? or The Golden Girls, but still professes to hate them), so I figured I'd get the same reaction here. It seems, though, that Bill Cosby is still cool. We've been going around the house intermittently singing the Chocolate Cake for Breakfast song ever since.
Cosby, of course, went mainstream (and kind of boring) in the mid-eighties with The Cosby Show and Bill Cosby Mysteries, but as a standup comedian, the man has been a king among kings since the sixties. I've always thought Himself has actually been his best set; pieces of it (including the Chocolate Cake for Breakfast song and the immortal first line of the album: "Dentists tell you not to pick your teeth with any sharp metal object. Then you sit in their chair...") have become cultural icons, quoted even by those who have no idea where they came from. Unlike the album, though, the film of Himself is not the entirely-wholesome image that Cosby kind of grew into after The Cosby Show started airing; his first monologue here, about drugs, is not off-color, but it's definitely a mature theme, and Cosby proves himself as hysterical when walking the same ground as folks like Richard Pryor and George Carlin as he is when doing the family-oriented stuff. (During my drunk years, I always used to do the "oh, toilet bowl, you're my only friend" routine when I found myself in, erm, that position.)
This is straight-out four-on-the-floor funny stuff, and it remains the finest standup video I've ever seen. Great stuff. And I now have evidence, though it's the smallest of sample sizes, that new generations are also finding Cosby as funny as us old folks. This is a must-see. **** ½
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I knew Bill Cosby had done stand up, but I had never seen it until I watched this recording of one of his shows from 1983. The man is absolutely hilarious.
As a warm up of sorts, he starts out by talking about people who use alcohol and drugs to have "fun" on the weekends. Then he discusses going to the dentist. Finally, he gets to the main event where family life is skewered. Everything from "natural childbirth" to trying to wrangle 5 kids to the change from parents to grandparents (watching his parents make the change that is) is fair game here.
Those looking for something visually stimulating will be disappointed. This is just Bill, a microphone, and a chair (which he sits in more often than not) for the entire time. But please don't let that stop you. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. And his observations are absolutely true, too. At times he has a point to make, but he makes it with dead accurate humor.
And this movie is mostly clean, too. There was one word early on and a bit at the end I didn't appreciate, but we're talking about a minute out of an hour and forty-five minutes of comedy. I'm not complaining. His wife comes across a bit harshly at times, but he also comes across as lazy. These bits probably wouldn't fly today, but they work when you remember one element of comedy is exaggeration.
If you haven't yet experienced this comedic gem, get it today. You'll be laughing for years to come.
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