Bill Cosby and me

I see in today’s paper that a circle has closed, between Bill Cosby and me.

We both now have won Mark Twain awards. His award is a teense bigger than mine. His is presented by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Mine was presented (in 1990) by the western division of the Associated Press News Executives. But it is a Mark Twain award nevertheless. It weighs a ton, and there is a bust of Mark Twain right there on it.

Bill Cosby won his Mark Twain award for humor, and that is part of the circle closing. I once contributed to his humor, on an evening in 1961 when we both happened to be at the old hungry i, in San Francisco. He was starting his stand-up comedy career, and I was starting at Stanford University. I think my mother and my aunt were there, but I am not sure. I know for a fact that I was wearing slacks and black loafers and white socks.

Cosby spotted the white socks. I was sitting in, like, the second row. For a couple of minutes, he had great fun with those socks, giving the audience some laughs and me something to brag about to this very day. I am almost positive that he asked my mother – which is why I think she was there – if she had knitted me a reindeer sweater, to go with the white socks. But I may be mixing memories, which I am getting better at all the time. I do know that early in his career Cosby was very big on reindeer sweaters.

I got into the humor business myself, eventually. You could even say I was in the humor business at the time. Later, as a newspaper columnist making speeches, I would tell the audiences that I began at Stanford as a pre-med major. Then I flunked freshman chemistry. Then I flunked it again. “I didn’t leave a mark on it, and it didn’t leave a mark on me,” I said. They laughed like crazy.

So as a pre-med major, I made a good student of English, which was the first step toward a newspaper career during which I wrote a humor column for many years. I am trying to write humor right now. I try to write humor all the time. But my Mark Twain award was not for humor. It was for a long feature story I wrote in 1989 about, at age 46, meeting my father for the first time. That was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and I am glad the Associated Press News Executives thought I did it justice.

Bill Cosby, in the newspaper piece today, said Mark Twain inspired him, and he cited several of his favorite Twain pieces, one of which – “How to Cure a Cold” – I would also select. Cosby did not mention my two favorites, which are a special telling of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” translated into French and then back into English by Twain, and “A Hundred and Ten Tin Whistles,” an account of an evening spent by Twain at the home of Brigham Young. Mark Twain was one funny writer, and he stayed on top of the events, politicians and highly placed low-lifes of his day. I can’t bring myself to imagine how good he might have been as a blogger in 2008-09.

Cosby will receive his Mark Twain award on Oct. 26, at the Kennedy Center, before a live audience. I should try to wangle a second-row ticket, and wear white socks, and see if he remembers.