Collegiate Times

Bill Cosby visits Burruss Hall to provide students with wisdom, jokes.

Despite the chilly wind and spotty rain, very few Cosby sweaters could be spotted in the audience. In fact, Bill Cosby himself simply wore a Virginia Tech sweatshirt and sweatpants.

Cosby strolled on to the stage lazily — if not laboriously — yet the 74-year-old comic quickly showed he still had some pep left in him. 

He hunkered down on a chair and immediately began griping about the unpleasant weather. Welcome to Blacksburg.

Very quickly he changed his tune and embraced his inner Hokie. Tech’s fight song played for a few seconds before he cut it off and yelled, “Let’s go!” The crowd emphatically responded with “Hokies,” and he instantly won over anyone still questioning why they shelled out $20 to see this guy.

His set had a sluggish start, though it certainly wasn’t his fault. For whatever reason, Burruss was slow to fill up. 

Audience members kept trickling in for the first 30 minutes of the performance. Some frantically grabbed their cell phones in a desperate search to find their correct seats. The result was several unhappy patrons, including one man who very audibly exclaimed, “screw this,” while struggling to find his way.

While the first quarter of Cosby’s set was ultimately a lost cause for many, Cosby easily reeled them back in when he began discussing God and the creation of animals. He explained that several animals in particular must have angered God to incur the wrath.

“I don’t what the baboon did,” Cosby said. “But God said to him, ‘A certain part of you will be inflamed’ … and the penguin … ‘you will not have any knees.’”

Cosby continued on with several other fictional tales from the Bible before finally attempting to offer some substantiation for his claims.

“I don’t know where these pages (from the Bible) are,” Cosby said. “I suspect they’re somewhere in Utah.”

From religion, Cosby moved on to the topic of marriage. As he’s been married for 47 years, he certainly proved he has a lot to say about the institution. Before he launched into his spiel though, he asked for a little audience involvement, as he did several times during the show.

He began the discussion by saying, “Chess is a game of,” then paused and waited for the audience to fill in the blank. Most responded with “war,” but the answer he was looking for was “marriage.” His reasoning was told in typical Cosby fashion, delivered slowly and deliberately for proper effect.

“Chess is about marriage — look at the queen, moving wherever she wants,” Cosby said. “The king — the man — trails behind her (moving) one space at a time.”

The subservience of a husband to his wife was indeed a common theme throughout the evening. According to Cosby, the last real decision a man gets to make for himself is on his wedding day.

“A man gets to choose six to eight groomsmen because it’s the last time he’ll ever see them,” Cosby said. “Except maybe as pallbearers.”

Cosby leapt from marriage to his childhood, then later parenting his own kids. Throughout the nearly two-hour performance, Cosby kept the crowd in near constant laughter. 

At the end of the show, he simply raised a hand to indicate he was done, and Burruss burst into applause and gave him a well-earned standing ovation.

As a man in his ’70s, Cosby may be moving a bit slower, but he proved he’s still got plenty of funny left in him.

A version of this article appeared in the Oct 21 issue of the Collegiate Times.