From The Comic's Comic

A Piffany About How We Cement Legacies

No matter how you feel about whether the court system served justice to or against Bill Cosby, you have to reckon with the new knowledge you have about the iconic comedian, his legacy now tarnished. Or you don’t have to reckon with it, if you don’t want to. That’s the whole raison d’être for W. Kamau Bell’s docuseries, We Need To Talk About Cosby.

As Bell says in the opening minutes of the four-part examination, “While we’ve said a lot of things, it feels like we haven’t gotten to the root of the discussion.”

QUICK SIDEBAR NOTE: If you don’t have Showtime or haven’t gotten around to watching We Need To Talk About Cosby since the docuseries premiered two months ago, then here’s the trailer so you can get acquainted to what we’re talking about, exactly.

OK, now let’s get back into it…

While Bell interviewed plenty of people with plenty of perspectives on Cosby — from his alleged victims to his former TV co-workers and cultural and legal analysts in between — the root of the discussion is much bigger than one man and his misdeeds. It’s even bigger, perhaps, than the perpetual debate about whether we can separate the art from the artist. Because if we don’t talk about Cosby now, his legacy likely lives on long after we’re gone. How future generations think about him as a comedian, as an actor, and as a human being depends upon whether and how we have that conversation right now.

Kliph Nesteroff, a comedy historian, wryly noted to Bell that several theaters across North America still bear the name Pantages, despite the disgraced reputation of the man they’re named for — Alexander Pantages (1867-1936) was a titan in vaudeville who, in 1929, was convicted of raping a 17-year-old dancer, only to successfully win an acquittal in a second trial in which his lawyers attacked his accuser’s moral character. Pantages had to sell off most of his empire by the time of his death. The more things don’t change, the more they…sigh.

Does anyone attending a show at a Pantages Theatre now know any of this? Nesteroff thinks not, and it’s pretty easy to agree with him on that.

From the current web description for the Pantages Theatre at 6223 Hollywood Blvd., in Los Angeles: “The Pantages has become one of the greatest landmarks of Hollywood, signifying both the glorious past and adventuresome future of the world’s entertainment capital.”

Our grandchildren might never learn about the people and events that impact us now.

Just look at another new Showtime documentary, The Real Charlie Chaplin, for more evidence of how little we know or think about the artist behind the art. Do you know anything about Chaplin besides the fact that he was silent movie star? Could you even recognize him out of his movie “uniform”???

Or pay attention come October when Americans once again wrestle over why we celebrate Columbus Day, and whether we even should.

It’s why we have an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, why some Americans and especially New Yorkers say “never forget” about 9/11 — because they know how easy it is for us to move on, to get distracted by what’s in front of us, and forget.

It’s also at the root of the current conservative movement to pressure school boards into preemptively banning “Critical Race Theory” and restrict the teaching of American history to avoid discussions which might disturb some of us who don’t want to talk honestly about our past.

But I digress.

We cement legacies in real time.

The collective court of public opinion weighs the merits or demerits of the people and events that happen in our lives, and how we rule determines what we pass down to future generations about what mattered and what’s worth remembering and celebrating.

We are like dogs who have made a mess inside the house.

If you try to point it out to us later, we’ll only wonder why you’re yelling and wagging your finger at us. We’ll be sad, but we won’t know why exactly. And you’ll be left cleaning up after us. Metaphor over.

So we need to have the discussion now. Whether it’s about one man such as Cosby, or an entire movement in history, we cannot simply hope that avoiding the topic will solve any problems or even just make it go away.

If we don’t talk about it now, then history will continue to be written solely by the “winners,” as they say.

And in the end, we all lose.