BILL COSBY - COMICS GALORE OUTSHINED BY COSBY AT TRIBUTE

COMICS GALORE OUTSHINED BY COSBY AT TRIBUTE

A host of veteran comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Carl Reiner, Sinbad, and Dick Gregory, paid tribute to Bill Cosby as he received the 12th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington Monday night. And while each of them drew laughter from the audience, they were all upstaged by clips from Cosby's TV appearances over nearly a half-century. Even a routine featuring Seinfeld and Rock together fell flat, with Seinfeld acknowledging the fact by remarking that everyone in the audience was probably thinking, "I thought these two guys would be funny together," and Rock rejoining, "But we're not." All of the comics told how they had listened to Cosby's comedy albums as children and how they were influenced by them. All, that is, except 87-year-old Carl Reiner, himself a former Twain Prize recipient, who recalled how his then 16-year-old son Rob had excitedly told him about a Cosby appearance on the Tonight show. Later, Reiner related, he described Rob's excitement to Sheldon Leonard, who was producing The Dick Van Dyke Show , in which Reiner was a regular, and who was then casting a new series called I Spy , about a couple of tennis-playing secret agents. "Why couldn't one of them be black?" he remembered Leonard remarking, thus setting the stage for Cosby's eventual TV stardom. Accepting his award, Cosby reminisced about his early career, and finally referred to one of the TV clips shown earlier in the evening in which Jack Benny, arguably the premiere comedian of the 20th century, was reduced to helpless laughter watching a Cosby monologue during their joint appearance on a late-night talk show. "I'm especially happy that you saw Jack Benny fall out of that chair," he concluded.

27/10/2009