On Nov. 10, Bill Cosby’s social media team had a truly terrible idea.
“Let’s create a Bill Cosby meme generator!” they presumably thought to themselves. “The man is a beloved cultural icon who is on record as loving pudding! We understand the internet!”
What they probably should have thought, however, was: “Well, this seems like a cute idea, but Bill Cosby’s history of sexual assault allegations has recently reentered the sphere of public conversation. So we definitely should not do this.”
An Oct. 16 set from comedian Hannibal Buress reminded the world that despite his “[smug] old black man persona…you raped women, Bill Cosby. So that brings you down a couple notches.” The segment went viral and sparked new coverage of a decades-old issue.
Fourteen women accused Cosby of drugging and raping them in a 2004 lawsuit, which was settled in 2006, according to an Oct. 31 Washington Post article. Newsweek published an interview on Feb. 12 with Barbara Bowman, who accused Cosby of assaulting her several times in the late 1980s, when she was 18 and 19 years old. (The statute of limitations has expired for Bowman, so she cannot bring charges against Cosby.)
It’s good that Cosby’s brand is becoming blatantly toxic, but it’s also upsetting that it took this long to happen. How? How could at least 14 women have had the same experience with him and be willing to go to court for it without major backlash from the public for a decade?
The answer lies just a couple trending topics above from #CosbyMeme, in a singularly bizzare, surreally comic video called “Too Many Cooks.”
It’s an ‘80s sitcom opening that never ends, devolving into a nightmarish hellscape. It’s backed by a catchy tune and maddeningly simple lyrics.
But Simon Pegg, a comic actor and writer, tweeted perhaps the best deconstruction of the video’s appeal on Nov. 10: “The genius of #toomanycooks is that it uses a simple riff on repetition to Trojan horse a fierce attack on the toxic entropy of nostalgia.”
Nostalgia. That sneakily sinister longing that makes the good, old days seem better than now, that allows us to construct our own narratives of our past, that creates something like the truth – only more comfortable.
That comfort is dangerous. It allows us to idolize our childhood heroes until they’re beyond reproach, until it takes 10 years and a popular stand-up comedian to make us reconsider our opinions.
The only reason Bill Cosby has gotten away with being both an alleged serial rapist and beloved TV dad is that we let him. And we let him because we wanted to. We didn’t want to let the truth get in the way of our memories, to turn something beloved into something sad and dark and upsetting.
But we have to. Romanticizing the past doesn’t make the present any better. It just allows us to sink deeper into the lies we tell ourselves.
Let’s not lie to ourselves. Let’s build a future based in what could be, not what we wish could have been. And let’s make more videos like “Too Many Cooks,” because that is 11 minutes of utter battiness, and the world needs more joyful lunacy like it.
