For audiences of a certain generation, their introduction to Bill Cosby was not through his kinetic stand-up comedy and not as the wisecracking household head Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.” 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 “Hey, hey, hey!”; 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 “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” 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), “Fat Albert” was Mr. Cosby’s 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 celebrity’s perch to be 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 “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: The Complete Series,” 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 “Fat Albert” 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 “Fat Albert” 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] “Fat Albert” 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 people’s feelings, “Fat Albert” would become “Big Fella.” 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 there’s Dumb Donald. Rudy, he’s 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 that’s Rudy’s level. And then there’s Bill, who’s sort of like a 9-year-old narrator for “Our Town.” He’s the voice who stands out. The fellows who didn’t 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 — 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 didn’t 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 he’s a loner until the football game when he catches the pass. It’s just mythical and it really doesn’t solve anything.
That’s a football game, now let’s do math. Now let’s do, you’re 13 years old, are you invited to the white kid’s 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 I’m doing, believed that my work is sort of like Aesop, and would like to put it into that form.
The “Fat Albert” 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 don’t. But to this day, I have this memory of Ennis Cosby. I took him out to the studio, I think Ennis might have been 6 or 7, and I explained as much as I could. I went into the recording studio, doing the voices. [Fat Albert voice] “Hey, hey, hey.” And when I came out I was attacked on the right thigh by my son. And he said: “Dad! You’re Fat Albert!” Well, man. That was it. New best friend in the whole world.
Did you see “Fat Albert” 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, who’s 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. I’m 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 I’m 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, where’s the difference?
Do you think it’s possible that, for some viewers, “Fat Albert” was their first exposure to black people?
No, not the first. It’s too easy to say, in the United States of America, “I never saw – ” No, no, time out. Du Bois said many people on his level of education said, “I don’t think of you as a Negro.” So what do you think of me as? You’re confessing your own thought. Which in itself needs examination, as the person is turning red.
You’re outspoken in your criticism of present-day black popular culture, and the values — or lack of values — you feel it puts forward. Do you think that “Fat Albert” offers the better model?
Well, obviously. Statistics will – as statistics will – prove me correct. And statistics will prove me incorrect. I don’t care. It is that I put something out that I believe in. Today’s culture, which is vomitous – it’s not a culture, you’ve got to define what that is, instead of giving it a word that is so highly regarded. To look at “Fat Albert” today, hearing the stories, they can always be discussed, if there’s someone to discuss them. If a viewer does what Bill Cosby says: “If you pay attention, you just may learn something.” When we do that, can “Fat Albert” make the same impression today? If “Fat Albert” 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 “Fat Albert.” It’s covered. We did the little guy who’s not accepted because he’s little. We did the Jewish kid who can’t play on Saturday. We did the little girl who won’t talk because she’s 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, “Fat Albert” might look quaint?
Now wait, you blew my mind. You said quaint. Where would the quaint come in? That’s because people think that today is so hip. I don’t know if you have any friends who have an 8-year-old kid. Man, when you listen to them, they’re 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 ain’t hip. As your friend’s 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 they’re not hip. “Hip to what,” said the parents? “Hip about the things that I want.” And then the parents will say, “You’re not hip, because you haven’t gone out to get a job, so you can buy the things you want.” And one of ‘em, especially, is a house, because you can’t have that in this house. What would Fat Albert do today, if he had a cellphone? No-brainer. We could even, with Fat Albert today, attack profanity. That is, public 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, you’ve knocked two pitches out of the park. The point is, I have no doubt that this would be entertaining as “Fat Albert” is, and I’ve heard a ton of people come up to me, in the airport – now we’re talking people, I’m not talking about the private plane and the executive and the C.E.O. and the C.O.O. – I’m talking about the economy class. “My 11-year-old daughter loves Fat Albert.” “My 20-year-old just saw it, and I can’t get it away from him.” So, right now it’s 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.