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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFrom a chair on a bare stage, Cosby walks us through the life of the American male, from childhood to parenthood. A pioneering sitcom takes shape before our eyes, and Cosby is reborn as a nation's iconic exasperated dad. Thirty years ago this week, the comic's legendary concert film premiered in theaters. GQ asked seven top comedians to explain why you need to see it.\n\nLarry Wilmore\n\n It's clear that the concert is the template for The Cosby Show. It's kind of strikingly personal, I think, when you look at it now all those pictures of his family during the opening montage. To me, the ultimate line in \"Himself\"\u2014and it's not really a joke, it's what we all heard as kids: \"I brought you into this world, I'll take you out of it.\" But Cosby added a brilliant line to it: \"And I can make another one just like you.\" Five years earlier you had Richard Pryor with Live in Concert. Here's the difference between the two concerts: Pryor talked about his mouth being sore from giving oral sex to a woman. Then five years later Bill Cosby talked about his mouth being sore from going to the dentist. Which could've been done 30 years earlier. That's five years after Pryor breaks, just shatters, what standup is. Looking back at it, Himself was retro even when it came out\u2014and beautiful in its simplicity. But as good as Richard Pryor: Live in Concert is, the Cosby thing, as a piece of standup, I think, is even better. I don't think there was a better one before it, and I don't think there's been a better one since.\n\nJerry Seinfeld\n\n Pryor was the first comedian to release concert movies. It had not been done before, and I always had the feeling that this was Cosby's attempt to do a similar thing. Even though he was a clean comedian and Pryor was a comedian who used any language he wanted, what was so impressive to me was it was as funny as the Pryor movies.\n\nSarah Silverman\n\n It was simply shot. No big camera moves, no set at all, just a background of very subtly changing color. The shot was tight. The camera pulled out wide only when his bits were physical and the audience needed to see a full-body shot. All the magic came from his performance, from his face. I loved that.\n\nWilmore\n\n Himself was a change for Cosby. Up until that moment he was always talking from the point of view of the child in relationship to his parents. In Himself, he became the adult. The dentist routine is one of the funniest routines ever. I'll never forget when I first heard him doing the lip-falling [of a patient under an oral anesthetic]\u2014the Abbuh-buh, adubuh-duh\u2014and he's getting mad trying to talk. I mean, I was just crying laughing. Here's Cosby's other genius\u2014and he did this early on. He would make the sounds of what he was telling you so you'd relive it. He always had the Official Voice [in deep voice]\u2014\"I'M GOING TO DO THIS!\"\u2014and the Helpless Voice [high-pitched]\u2014\"Oh, no!\" So you always had this play going on in front of you. Pryor adopted that. Comics still do it today.\n\nRay Romano\n\n Another one that just cracked me up was when he did the whole story about Jeffrey and his mother on the airplane. The kid won't shut up and the kid's cute but he's bothering everybody and it's such a big buildup. When the mother gets off the plane and sees the husband waiting for her she punches him in the face! It's the perfect way to say it\u2014\"Don't leave me with this kid again!\"\u2014and she doesn't have to use any words. Cosby is a really great actor, he can mimic everything\u2014the kid, the mother, whatever. He's in the moment as he's telling that story and the audience reads it in his face and his demeanor, his everything, and they're thinking along with him.\n\nHannibal Buress\n\n It's stuff that holds up. All of it is evergreen. He talks about asking somebody, \"Why do you do cocaine?\" \"Because it intensifies your personality.\" Cosby says, \"What if you're an asshole?\"  I think it's the only time he curses during the whole special. There've been times when I've had to work clean where I take the \"fucks\" out of a joke and see if the joke still holds up. That's a good ercise to make sure people are laughing at the actual content and not at the profanity. It definitely is tough to work clean. If I had to do an hour clean now, I don't know how I'd pull it off.\n\nPatton Oswalt\n\n I was just another teenager growing up in suburbia. I'd heard all his albums and was a big fan. But to see him visually doing what he was doing, that was a big deal. Up to that point a lot of the standup I'd watched was very frenetic and they would run around onstage and be very active. He was sitting down but even more in control because of that. He was kind of controlling the volume of what he was doing and the impact of what he was saying.\n\nSeinfeld\n\n I had never seen anyone use a chair before\u2014in the middle of a standup set, to sit down in a chair, in the middle of the stage. Sometimes you'd have so-called Beat comedians, they would sit on a stool\u2014maybe Lenny [Bruce] would do that. In fact I'm thinking there's probably some scenes in the Dustin Hoffman movie where he's in some little smoky coffeehouse in the Village and he's sitting on a stool in that Beat style. But this is not that. This is a stage in a theater, and to sit down on a chair was an incredibly confident move. Most comedians would say that standing up and performing to a seated audience is 90 percent of the advantage you have over them! That, and the fact that you have a microphone. Of course it did not diminish his power in the slightest. In fact it seemed to add to it. Just imagine yourself in a living room at a gathering of people and everyone's sitting around, and one person in the living room stands up and says, \"I'll tell you this\u2014\" Well, everyone's gonna suddenly be quiet and turn and listen to that person because they're standing and everyone else is sitting. I'm sure even in the Paleozoic Era, that worked: Standing has power. Sitting does not.\n\nEric Andre\n\n I couldn't stop admiring his mic technique. That's a thing that comics zero in on but civilians don't\u2014the way he sat in the chair and held his microphone at his knee, like so far away from his mouth: I was like, \"Dude, that is the shit.\" He's so comfortable. Like, it's all about finding comfort on stage and finding comfort in silences and being comfortable bombing, because when you're comfortable the audience is comfortable. And I've never seen a level of comfort that high until I saw that special. Just him sitting in the chair and having the microphone on his knee, I was like, \"Fuuuck, I have so much farther to go.\"\n\nRomano\n\n I'm in the business, I've been doing standup for, oh boy, almost twenty-five years. I know all the tricks. It's like magicians: we know the trick, we know what's going on. I know it! I'm aware of it! I do it! And yet I swear I feel like Bill is just telling this story for the first time, like he's just having a conversation with you.\n\nOswalt\n\n I loved the way the jokes build about putting the kids to bed at night. He describes it almost like a soccer game. He's not worried about, \"O.K., I gotta get to one punchline here.\" He keeps telling the story and there's a bunch of different punchlines along the way, rather than \"I'm gonna tell this one quick thing and, boom, there'll be one laugh.\" There's eighty laughs in that thing. But none of them end the story. They're just a laugh along the way and it's brilliant.\n\nSeinfeld\n\n Most comedians don't work in the kind of format where you get one idea and it's twenty minutes long. Most comedians get an idea and it's ninety seconds long, until they've said everything they want to say about it. With a really good comedian\u2014three minutes, four minutes on one idea? That's a lot.\n\nBuress\n\n Telling stories is hard. I've done that, where I've been in the middle of a five-or six-minute story and I can tell it's not working and then I just have to go all the way through with a long story that the crowd isn't into. Or I can just bail on it, which is worse.\n\nSeinfeld\n\n What you were seeing here was a guy who could go through so many layers of rock in exploring a comedic premise. All his bits, they're so detailed and developed. He paints murals as opposed to pictures, and that's what really separates him. Not only do you have to have that comedic skill but you also have a tremendous gift of stage presence to hold the audience's attention that long. Comedians, we don't take pauses like him. If I took a pause like that, by the time I started talking again half the room would be empty. But the audience has such natural confidence in him, and he has in himself, and that's a bond. That they're gonna wait. They trust him. They know he's taking them somewhere good. That's when you can take a pause like that.\n\nRomano\n\n I wouldn't believe it unless I saw his notes that he actually rehearsed this and thought of this and added this line and then honed it, because it feels like he's just talking extemporaneously. And that's the trick, and he's the best at it.\n\nSeinfeld\n\n The reason comedians tell so many jokes in succession is that's how we hold the audience's attention. Think of Rodney Dangerfield. Your attention doesn't wander because there's another punchline coming every twenty seconds. That's a basic comedic principle. Richard Pryor was doing the same thing as Cosby. It certainly put those two guys on a level way above everybody else. They separated themselves completely.\n\nRomano\n\n I know his philosophy on [cursing], that it is kind of a crutch, and I guess to some extent that's true. I think the reason Bill is so revered and so good is because he doesn't need it and I don't think the audience would even accept it from him. I don't hold it against comics that do it, but I do get turned off when it doesn't feel organic or it doesn't feel part of the bit. You can almost get desensitized to it. I feel like they should edit themselves and they're maybe not even aware of it. It's like when you grade a high dive: Cosby gets higher grades than everybody, because of the degree of difficulty\u2014being as funny as he always was, to all types of audience.\n\nSeinfeld\n\n It's organic. You just kinda know what fits you. It's just like trying on jackets in a men's store. When you look in the mirror and you go, \"I like this one.\"\n\nOswalt\n\n But's he's always had darkness in his act. His dad sounds like kind of a violent guy, and in Himself, when he talks about his grandmother being sweet to his kids, he's like, \"That's just a really mean woman trying to get to Heaven.\"\n\nAndre\n\n He's kinda sexist [in Himself]. He's like, \"I wanted a son instead of a daughter.\" It was like, Whoa! It was interesting to see. He's known for being a Mr. Clean, so you feel like his edginess is more important. It's like he's saving it up. When he's the least bit dirty or edgy it's like he means it, it's like it's coming out of him\u2014like he can't not be edgy.\n\nRomano\n\n There's an edge of he's put-upon. He's put-upon by his kids, by the people who want to party, by the people who want to do drugs. I don't know if he's a misanthrope, but it's funny how he openly talks about how his kids are such a pain to him, and yet you can see through it, you know that it's through love, so he can get away with it. We love our family and we would do it all over again but they drive us crazy. I do a whole bit about my wife refusing to answer any stupid questions, and there's an exact line that he said: \"If you ask me one more stupid question I'm going to get the shotgun and shoot you in the face.\" Watching Himself again this week, I almost accused myself of stealing from him!\n\nSeinfeld\n\n People understood comedy much better in those days than they do now. Now they think that these things that you say onstage are opinions, and then they understood that they were jokes, and jokes have only one desired result, and that is to amuse. It's words assembled to amuse, that's what a joke is. An opinion is something you really think, and people have lost that thread. We've somehow confused comedians with politicians. We think these things mean something. They don't. I saw Don Rickles last week, and you know, he caught flak for an Obama joke\u2014some joke about Obama being a custodian or something at the White House, you know. The kind of joke that he's done his entire career. And now suddenly people think it means something. Like this is some opinion or actual political position. It's neither.\n\nRomano\n\n I watched Bill the other night on Letterman. He came out and he sat down and I was just amazed how he doesn't even say anything and you're just drawn in. He opened a door for all of us, for all of the networks to even consider that this was a way to create a character, was to take someone who can hold an audience just by being up there and telling their story. He created that. He created the whole idea of taking a quote-unquote \"comic\" and developing a TV show just from a persona that you see onstage.\n\nAndre\n\n My dad's a black doctor, and The Cosby Show came out right around when my Dad got his doctorate and started practicing medicine, and I think my Dad considered changing his last name to Huxtable. So I have an emotional attachment to The Cosby Show. Himself brought context to me: I understood The Cosby Show completely. It was like the first time I did acid, I totally understood Ren &amp;amp; Stimpy. I saw him at the Apollo live a few years ago and same thing. He was in the chair, he had a box of tissues, he'd blow his nose after every joke... But he's like Dad, man. Bill Cosby's like Dad and Richard Pryor's like your dirty old uncle. You know what I mean? Uncle Richard would, like, sneak you beers and give you firecrackers at Thanksgiving. Bill Cosby is like every comedian's father."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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