For audiences of a certain generation, their introduction to Bill Cosby was not through his kinetic standup comedy and not as the wisecracking household head Dr. Cliff Huxtable on âThe Cosby Show.â To these viewers who grew up glued to their TV sets on Saturday mornings, Mr. Cosby was first and foremost an overweight neighborhood kid with a rallying cry of âHey, hey, hey!â; as well as a bucktoothed adolescent with an unusual speech impediment; and, somehow, a more youthful version of himself.
These were among the characters that Mr. Cosby played on âFat Albert and the Cosby Kids,â the animated series he created based on his own upbringing in the housing projects of Philadelphia, and which ran on CBS and in syndication from 1972 through 1985. A combination of slapstick comedy and gentle moralizing (and a catchy opening theme song), âFat Albertâ was Mr. Cosbyâs Trojan horse to cut through the vast cartoon wasteland and teach children about basic values and issues of the day, in episodes that dealt with the consequences of cheating on tests, cutting school and confronting gang violence. The series helped Mr. Cosby earn a doctorate in education, and presaged how he would later use his celebrityâs perch as a more full-throated critic of ills he sees in black culture and society.
Fat Albert has been less vocal in recent years, but he and his junkyard gang are returning in âFat Albert and the Cosby Kids: The Complete Series,â a DVD boxed set that Shout! Factory will release on June 25, collecting all 110 episodes of the animated show. Mr. Cosby spoke recently to ArtsBeat about the creation of the âFat Albertâ cartoon series and its characters, what it represented to him and why he believes it is still relevant. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Did âFat Albertâ start as an idea that you pitched to the studios and networks, or did they come to you about it?
Wrong on both sides. [laughter] âFat Albertâ was first a monologue, and it had people in it like some of the guys that I went around with, in both my early pre-teens and into my late teens, in North Philadelphia. In the close quarters of the housing projects, people had nicknames, invented by the kids. So a guy with a lot of fat, that was the first thing he got. Later, as we decided to not hurt peopleâs feelings, âFat Albertâ would become âBig Fella.â Overweight people, back in the 20s, 30s and 40s, on the Broadway stage and in movies they immediately became the funny person, the clown. The person you could make fun of, the person who made fun of himself. But these characters were invented because I wanted to change, break the stereotypes. I changed Albert, making him the leader and giving him the intelligence.
Where did the ideas for the other kids come from?
Old Weird Harold was tall, but gangly, disoriented athletically, clumsy. Then I moved to the speech impediment with Mushmouth, and from there into one decision made wrong, and you become dumb, so thereâs Dumb Donald. Rudy, heâs got an Adonis feeling about himself, way past what his real value is. His nemesis [Russell] is a 5-year-old child who can stay right with him, because thatâs Rudyâs level. And then thereâs Bill, whoâs sort of like a 9-year-old narrator for âOur Town.â Heâs the voice who stands out. The fellows who didnât make the cut, these nicknames were because of the way a person looked. One was Weasel, who had the look of a rodent face. And I think the other kid had a dip in the center of his head â" that would be Saddle.
How did these characters then get onto television?
There was a Bill Cosby special, and in that special there were monologues of mine that were featured. The [animated] Fat Albert story had to do with Albert and the boys playing against these tough guys from another neighborhood. But behind his back, his own buddies - Rudy, Old Weird Harold, Russell, Bill - were all laughing at his fatness. And they didnât realize while they were talking on the corner, Albert is in his bed, and it is hurting his feelings. And he decides he is not going to play. And then the obvious happens, that they apologize for it, and then Albert shows up and they win the game. I wrote that as a satire on all of the racial stories where a black kid is the end on a football team, and nobody likes him and heâs a loner until the football game when he catches the pass. Itâs just mythical and it really doesnât solve anything.
Thatâs a football game, now letâs do math. Now letâs do, youâre 13 years old, are you invited to the white kidâs co-ed birthday party, unless you bring your own black girl? Lou Scheimer and Filmation came along and had a meeting with me, believed in what Iâm doing, believed that my work is sort of like Aesop, and would like to put it into that form.
The âFat Albertâ characters were becoming popular as your children were growing up. Did they make the connection that this is their dad doing all of this?
I never bothered to sit with any of the children and say, this is who I am. You have to play these things as you go - your children can wind up being scarred, whether they know who you are or they donât. But to this day, I have this memory of Ennis Cosby. I took him out to the studio, I think Ennis might have been six or seven, and I explained as much as I could. I went into the recording studio, doing the voices. [Fat Albert voice] âHey, hey, hey.â And when I came out I was attacked on the right thigh by my son. And he said, âDad! Youâre Fat Albert!â Well, man. That was it. New best friend in the whole world.
Did you see âFat Albertâ as presenting an authentic depiction of the world you grew up in, or was it meant to be more idealized?
I saw it as a black, whoâs been rejected as a human being. In the eyes of some - capital letters - people, this color causes an insanity in their minds. Their joy is in pulling the legs off, wrapping a rope around the neck of, denying any place, specifically attacking the mind of the brown-skinned person. All over, these crimes, these atrocities, placed on these people of color. Iâm specifying where I lived, and who I am, to these people. It is not idealized at all. It is a continuation of the thought that, if what Iâm saying happened to me and to my guys, and you are of a different culture, color, race, religion, and the same thing happened to you, whereâs the difference?
Do you think itâs possible that, for some viewers, âFat Albertâ was their first exposure to black people?
No, not the first. Itâs too easy to say, in the United States of America, âI never saw - â No, no, time out. Du Bois said many people on his level of education said, âI donât think of you as a Negro.â So what do you think of me as? Youâre confessing your own thought. Which in itself needs examination, as the person is turning red.
Youâre outspoken in your criticism of present-day black popular culture, and the values â" or lack of values â" you feel it puts forward. Do you think that âFat Albertâ offers the better model?
Well, obviously. Statistics will - as statistics will - prove me correct. And statistics will prove me incorrect. I donât care. It is that I put something out that I believe in. Todayâs culture, which is vomitous - itâs not a culture, youâve got to define what that is, instead of giving it a word that is so highly regarded. To look at âFat Albertâ today, hearing the stories, they can always be discussed, if thereâs someone to discuss them. If a viewer does what Bill Cosby says: âIf you pay attention, you just may learn something.â When we do that, can âFat Albertâ make the same impression today? If âFat Albertâ came to be true today, the changes would be not so much the behavior [of the characters], because good behavior is based on truth. We did - he said, braggingly - we did bullying in âFat Albert.â Itâs covered. We did the little guy whoâs not accepted because heâs little. We did the Jewish kid who canât play on Saturday. We did the little girl who wonât talk bcause sheâs been abused. We did a ton of these things. And today it would be with Bill Cosby at the helm, not even a drip of sweat, thinking how to do things for quote-unquote today.
Are you concerned that, by contemporary standards, âFat Albertâ might look quaint?
Now wait, you blew my mind. You said quaint. Where would the quaint come in? Thatâs because people think that today is so hip. I donât know if you have any friends who have an 8-year-old kid. Man, when you listen to them, theyâre wondering what to do. My TV set is telling my kid something. The radio, the songs. Your friends are parents now, and this stuff is not funny. And, mon frère, it ainât hip. As your friendâs 8-year-old doubles to 16, in that process, that kid will begin to do that which an awful lot of kids will do, which is, tell the parents theyâre not hip. âHip to what,â said the parents? âHip about the things that I want.â And then the parents will say, âYouâre not hip because you havenât gone out to get a job, so you can buy the things you want.â And one of âem, especially, is a house, because you canât have that in this house. What would Fat Albert do today, if he had a cell phone? No-brainer. We could even, with Fat Albert today, attack profanity. That is, pblic profanity, because it is still duplicitous. There are people who say it on film, and four-letter words happen to be entertainment. Now, you see, youâve knocked two pitches out of the park. The point is, I have no doubt that this would be entertaining as âFat Albertâ is, and Iâve heard a ton of people come up to me, in the airport - now weâre talking people, Iâm not talking about the private plane and the executive and the CEO and the COO - Iâm talking about the economy class. âMy 11-year-old daughter loves Fat Albert.â âMy 20-year-old just saw it, and I canât get it away from him.â So, right now itâs underground. But when these people put it out, I have no doubt that this is going to be something they will put right up there with the Huxtables.