A capacity crowd packed Alumni Arena Thursday evening to listen to famous comedian and television icon Bill Cosby speak about growing up, parenthood and dentistry, as the Distinguished Speaker Series concluded for this semester.
Due to the inclement Buffalo weather, Cosby had to drive from New York City and didn't arrive in Buffalo until 20 minutes before the lecture was scheduled to start. Audience members didn't seem to mind the 30-minute delay, and greeted Cosby with a riotous standing ovation when he took the stage.
"I was in Manhattan, and then the wind started to blow," Cosby said. "The pilot said to me, 'There are 60 mph gusts, it's snowing, and the runway - well, you can't fly.'"
Acting more like a performer than a lecturer, Cosby pushed aside the podium, took a seat, and regaled the audience with stories about how he began his comedy career and how he got his daughter into college.
With his classic wit about him from start to finish, Cosby was at the top of his stand-up game, as his seemingly disconnected anecdotes added up in the end.
The subjects of Cosby's two-hour performance ranged from the way people laugh, to the quirks of the entertainment industry, to the ideas people come up with when they are high.
With a story about his first big shot in the comedy world, and his subsequent first failure, Cosby stressed the importance of self-confidence.
"For so many of you students, you don't believe in yourselves, and that's your own fault," he said. "You have to be sure of yourself to get up and do something. Being cocky is when you don't have anything to back it up."
Cosby's stories were full of colorful characters, comical experiences and more tangents than one could count. At one point he stopped talking to pet the buffalo behind him and ask, "How's the missus?"
The show was not, however, without its morals and advice.
"Your parents, your guardians - I'm on their side," said Cosby. "The interesting thing about parenting is that you get to see yourself as your children grow up. It's frightening to see an 18-year-old or 19-year-old running something. But then you remember, you were there once."
Cosby also took plenty of shots at the differences between girls and boys and what it was like to grow up when he was a kid.
"There was no child abuse back then. Any old person could just come up and hit you," he said. "There was no ADD, no ADHD. You were just dumb."
The story that received the most laughs was one about family life, as Cosby fondly recollected when his daughters sewed up the crotch in his underpants without telling him, leaving the celebrity in a race to strip out of his suit in a public bathroom before he urinated, as other men took the stalls next to him and stared and asked, "Aren't you Bill Cosby?"
