[Shawnee123]

My parents cussed around us. We were not to. In fact I remember once saying "dang" and dad said it sounded too much like "damn."

Eh, they're just words made up of letters that someone decided a long time ago were "bad." Certainly you don't want a child running around cussing, but most parents teach their children well in this aspect, I've found.

I found this nice little article about Bill Cosby's early standup.



Bill Cosby: Himself is one of the first -- only -- standup comedy films that your parents found just as funny as you did when you were 10. Cosby is such a skilled comedian, his riffs on a visit to the dentist, going through childbirth with your wife and recovering from a night of heavy drinking pretty much destroyed the topics for future comedians; no one was going to top Cosby, and everybody knew it. And this is not the sanitized Fat Albert Cosby either. When he talked about believing, up to the age of 12, that his brother's name was "Jesus Christ!" and his name was "Goddammit!" because the expletives were the only ways his father ever referred to them, the laughs had real bite. Twenty years later, it's a shock to see Cosby talking about parental abuse, alcoholism and, most memorably, cocaine ("See, the thing is," he recalls a man telling him, "cocaine enhances my personality." Cosby responds, "Yeah, but what if you're an asshole?")

Years of Jell-O commercials have filtered Cosby in the public consciousness into a crotchety, Cardigan-sweatered kids-do-the-craziest-thing caricature, but he was the pro's pro. Even more than longtime nemesis Richard Pryor, he was an influence on every comedian who followed him. And though it might seem corny, Cosby told truths that every family had faced, unsanitized but still clean, smart without ever pandering. Long live The Breathing Cosbys!


[/hijack..oh, HI, jack!]