As one of the most influential and gifted comics of his time, Bill Cosby dissolved racial barriers on television from the 1960s to the 1980s, created the epochal situation comedy The Cosby Show, produced memorable educational programs for children, and made a series of much adored advertisements. Cosby's enormously influential style as an on-stage comic influenced a generation. On the 1968 album To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With, Cosby's comedy brings everyday experience away from any broader historical meaning to the level of the mundane and thus, the "universal." This quality of universality helps to account for his ability to traverse ordinarily sensitive racial, gender, and age divides with ease and grace.

Bill Cosby

In the style developed during his early years performing at nightclubs and recording a number of successful comedy albums, Cosby became his audience in their most ordinary, everyday aspects...