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                   Bill Cosby - Himself [DVD Rip]
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Artist...............: Bill Cosby
Album................: Himself [DVD Rip]
Genre................: Comedy
Year.................: 1983
Codec................: LAME 3.99
Version..............: MPEG 1 Layer III
Quality..............: CBR 128, (avg. bitrate: 128kbps)
Channels.............: Stereo / 32000 hz
 
http://image.bayimg.com/01e41294c77da95d5d364c8d09c1fbf691256211.jpg
 
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201306/bill-cosby-himself-30th-anniversary-june-2013

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                       Tracklisting
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   1. Bill Cosby - Himself                                 [01:43:47]

Playing Time.........: 01:43:47
Total Size...........: 95.14 MB

The 30th Anniversary of Bill Cosby: Himself ùAn All-Star Stand-Up Salute
Comedians reminisce over the greatest stand-up concert movie ever

From a chair on a bare stage, Cosby walks us through the life of the American male, from childhood to parenthood. A pioneering sitcom takes shape before our eyes, and Cosby is reborn as a nation's iconic exasperated dad. Thirty years ago this week, the comic's legendary concert film premiered in theaters. GQ asked seven top comedians to explain why you need to see it.

Larry Wilmore
It's clear that the concert is the template for The Cosby Show. It's kind of strikingly personal, I think, when you look at it now all those pictures of his family during the opening montage. To me, the ultimate line in "Himself"ùand it's not really a joke, it's what we all heard as kids: "I brought you into this world, I'll take you out of it." But Cosby added a brilliant line to it: "And I can make another one just like you." Five years earlier you had Richard Pryor with Live in Concert. Here's the difference between the two concerts: Pryor talked about his mouth being sore from giving oral sex to a woman. Then five years later Bill Cosby talked about his mouth being sore from going to the dentist. Which could've been done 30 years earlier. That's five years after Pryor breaks, just shatters, what standup is. Looking back at it, Himself was retro even when it came outùand beautiful in its simplicity. But as good as Richard Pryor: Live in Concert is, the Cosby thing, as a piece of standup, I think, is even better. I don't think there was a better one before it, and I don't think there's been a better one since.

Jerry Seinfeld
Pryor was the first comedian to release concert movies. It had not been done before, and I always had the feeling that this was Cosby's attempt to do a similar thing. Even though he was a clean comedian and Pryor was a comedian who used any language he wanted, what was so impressive to me was it was as funny as the Pryor movies.

Sarah Silverman
It was simply shot. No big camera moves, no set at all, just a background of very subtly changing color. The shot was tight. The camera pulled out wide only when his bits were physical and the audience needed to see a full-body shot. All the magic came from his performance, from his face. I loved that.

Wilmore
Himself was a change for Cosby. Up until that moment he was always talking from the point of view of the child in relationship to his parents. In Himself, he became the adult. The dentist routine is one of the funniest routines ever. I'll never forget when I first heard him doing the lip-falling [of a patient under an oral anesthetic]ùthe Abbuh-buh, adubuh-duhùand he's getting mad trying to talk. I mean, I was just crying laughing. Here's Cosby's other geniusùand he did this early on. He would make the sounds of what he was telling you so you'd relive it. He always had the Official Voice [in deep voice]ù"I'M GOING TO DO THIS!"ùand the Helpless Voice [high-pitched]ù"Oh, no!" So you always had this play going on in front of you. Pryor adopted that. Comics still do it today.

Ray Romano
Another one that just cracked me up was when he did the whole story about Jeffrey and his mother on the airplane.  The kid won't shut up and the kid's cute but he's bothering everybody and it's such a big buildup. When the mother gets off the plane and sees the husband waiting for her she punches him in the face! It's the perfect way to say itù"Don't leave me with this kid again!"ùand she doesn't have to use any words. Cosby is a really great actor, he can mimic everythingùthe kid, the mother, whatever. He's in the moment as he's telling that story and the audience reads it in his face and his demeanor, his everything, and they're thinking along with him.

Hannibal Buress
It's stuff that holds up. All of it is evergreen. He talks about asking somebody, "Why do you do cocaine?" "Because it intensifies your personality." Cosby says, "What if you're an asshole?" I think it's the only time he curses during the whole special. There've been times when I've had to work clean where I take the "fucks" out of a joke and see if the joke still holds up. That's a good exercise to make sure people are laughing at the actual content and not at the profanity. It definitely is tough to work clean. If I had to do an hour clean now, I don't know how I'd pull it off.

Patton Oswalt
I was just another teenager growing up in suburbia. I'd heard all his albums and was a big fan. But to see him visually doing what he was doing, that was a big deal. Up to that point a lot of the standup I'd watched was very frenetic and they would run around onstage and be very active. He was sitting down but even more in control because of that. He was kind of controlling the volume of what he was doing and the impact of what he was saying.

Seinfeld
I had never seen anyone use a chair beforeùin the middle of a standup set, to sit down in a chair, in the middle of the stage. Sometimes you'd have so-called Beat comedians, they would sit on a stoolùmaybe Lenny [Bruce] would do that. In fact I'm thinking there's probably some scenes in the Dustin Hoffman movie where he's in some little smoky coffeehouse in the Village and he's sitting on a stool in that Beat style. But this is not that. This is a stage in a theater, and to sit down on a chair was an incredibly confident move. Most comedians would say that standing up and performing to a seated audience is 90 percent of the advantage you have over them! That, and the fact that you have a microphone. Of course it did not diminish his power in the slightest. In fact it seemed to add to it. Just imagine yourself in a living room at a gathering of people and everyone's sitting around, and one person in the living room stands up and says, "I'll tell you thisù" Well, everyone's gonna suddenly be quiet and turn and listen to that person because they're standing and everyone else is sitting. I'm sure even in the Paleozoic Era, that worked: Standing has power. Sitting does not.