Two Number Ones - Writer and Actor: Legendary Storyteller versus Sitcom Artist

Bill Cosby’s story about telling stories.

“There has always been a mystery, to me, about ad-libbing, that was answered maybe 20 years ago,” he says. “Jonathan Winters is the only man that I know who would walk out and hell’s a poppin’. The only one. I think that the rest of us mortals – 12% on a fantastic night – ad lib. So everything that I do when I’m working comes from the thought of something to writing, whether I’m walking with no pencil, no paper — just walking and thinking and setting the thing in story form. That’s the way I work, in story form, so that I could have a funny idea or an idea that says, look there’s got to be something funny about all this, right?”

There are two ways to communicated emotions in a way that makes you smile and laugh. One is through a narrative by telling (or writing) stories and the other is through mental images created by painting images out of logical constructions. The former is known as storytelling and the latter is… Well, it is a different form of art. It evolved recently thanks in large part to the rapid proliferation of novel means of communication, like Television and the Internet.

Bill Cosby’s humor is based upon his ability to tell stories in a special way! As an artist, he is the progeny of his generation of storytellers, who had honed that art generally before the advent of televised shows. Unlike him, Jon Stewart has mastered the new medium to develop a novel kind of comedy show, which is based not upon simply telling a story but on re-living a humorous situation as an artist. As opposed to storytelling, no matter how much that is accompanied by stage performance, displaying a situation is more visual-based and more dynamic, and theatrical.

Pace is not the only difference between storytelling and situational comedy. There is a cultural difference between a relatively slow-paced story-based humor and a fast-paced dynamic situation-based humor! Bill Cosby is an old-school story-based comedian. His approach is generally based upon telling a story in a hilarious way characteristic of him. In fact, he is the author of a collection of his short stories of stand-ups.

In order to draw listeners into the narrative storytelling does not have to be interspersed with the use of expletives or profanities, if you choose not to. On the other hand, bringing the audience into a short-lived fast-paced situation requires additional verbal tools in order to promptly whip up the viewers’ senses.

In our fast-paced times, we are getting increasingly mobile. We are getting used to live on occasional funny situations. Long stories do not count any more. Some of those funny situations are expected to be so short-lived that they have to be forced into a constrictive 140-character-limit format. We just do not have time for longer narratives these days.

Perhaps, that is the main difference between the old-school clean funny story and the modern-day cheap funny situation. Both can be witty and hilarious. However, the times of extended fictional works in prose, both written and spoken, seem to have ended. Bill Cosby’s life-long performance is like a book of hilarious stories. Whereas, Jon’s is a mosaic of televised sitcom strips, deemed to be connected like dots into a larger picture.