Bill Cosby: Good, Clean Storyteller

Bill Cosby, in his role as a stand-up comedian, has a few rules.

One, no jokes. Two, no profanity. And three, no encores.

The 75-year-old has been doing it that way for nearly five decades. And he won’t be changing his routine during a return visit to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, October 7.

“I can’t give you a beginning, middle and end of what I’m going to say,” Mr. Cosby, who performed at the PAC in 2010, explained during a telephone interview last week from his home in western Massachusetts. “There’s a table and there will be a bottle of water and a box of Kleenex because some of the theaters are old and the stuff that floats around, I start sneezing. And then I have a chair and I sit down.

“The reason I sit down is one day, about 40 years ago, I noticed I was coming out and all the people were sitting down and I thought to myself, ‘Why am I standing and they’re sitting down?’” he continued. “So I asked the guy, ‘Give me a chair, will you?’ I sat in a chair and said, ‘I am a story teller, period.’ I don’t come out and do what people would call jokes.”

After all, every comedian dreads the failed joke. Telltale signs are dazed and confused smiles at the punch line, followed by a hurried “Get it? Get it?” from the teller, Mr. Cosby said.

“And then they’ll say something like, ‘Well, you had to be there,’” he said. “That’s the job of the storyteller. You have to be there. The storyteller should make you be there in the way of telling.”

And over his extensive career, he’s done just that. But before winning countless awards—including six consecutive Grammys for Best Comedy Performance, from 1965 to ’70; the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to television in 2002; and the 12th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2009—Mr. Cosby had to get his start somewhere.

Growing up in Philadelphia, he was dubbed the class clown before dropping out of school to join the Navy as a hospital corpsman. During his time working with seriously injured Korean War casualties, Mr. Cosby has said he realized he needed to finish his education. He earned his equivalency diploma before attending Temple University in his hometown.

To make some extra money, Mr. Cosby tended bar at the Cellar, a club in Philadelphia. And the more the undergraduate made his customers laugh, the higher his tips were.

As a result of his success at the Cellar, he left Temple and ventured onto the stage. Ever since, the comedian has written all of his own material, he said, but struggled with his style until a fateful meal at a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia. The year was 1962.

“I was watching nine people and this one fellow was talking to his friends at this one table and they were just falling all over themselves,” Mr. Cosby recalled. “Women were lifting napkins to, I don’t know, hide mascara runs and they were just laughing and laughing and laughing. And this guy, he wasn’t a professional because his friends kept saying, ‘What about when ... and yeah ...’ They were having a back and forth. They weren’t drunk. They were having a ball. And this guy was talking about himself. My thought came, ‘I can do that. I can write so that people will understand what I’m saying and I can make them be there.’”

During his show at the PAC, the comedian will likely riff on his childhood, raising children and marital relationships. But he was tight-lipped about the specifics.

“There’s a store called The Material Store for Comedy and it’s inside, it’s between—on both sides—my ears and it’s within a case, a bone case,” he said. “And my wife claims that these ideas come because I get beamed from some outer space things. And she said she just wanted me to know that upon my death, immediately, before any soul can leave the body, she’s going to have the head cracked so she can look in and see where the brain is supposed to be.”

She’s not sure what she’ll find, Mr. Cosby added, though what’s in his head is the source of his signature clean humor, he said. When he broke onto the comedy scene, clubs frowned upon profanity. Now, it’s practically celebrated, Mr. Cosby continued—though not by him.

“When it comes to my objection, it is about comedians who have great timing and quote, unquote, no material. That if you said to them, ‘Okay, you cannot curse,’ they wouldn’t have anything funny—some of them, not all,” he said. “I find that I would not have the material that I have, had I been allowed to get a laugh where the curse word is the punch line. Because that would tend to, I feel, have the same thing happen over and over. So in my storytelling, it’s absent on purpose.”

The 90-minute show at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center will be safe for all audiences, from toddlers to adults, “as long as they can hear,” Mr. Cosby said. And the 425-seat PAC—which is “quite quaint” compared to the 1,900- to 2,600-seat halls he’s used to entertaining in, he reported—will offer an intimate experience for theatergoers, he said.

At the PAC, as at other, larger venues, it will be just him, a table and his stories. And no superfluous drama.

“And the ending, I’m proud to say, is one where I say words to the effect of, ‘Thank you for having me, good night,’” he said. “I get up, go behind my chair, I take a bow—a very short bow—and they hit the lights full up and the music plays and I wave and they don’t see me again. I hate it when performers do those fake bows. The audiences love them. They love them. They thought they were gone but here they come! We want more, we want more, et cetera, et cetera. There’s no fake bow with me.”

Bill Cosby will perform on Sunday, October 7, at 8 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $100, $145 and $170. For more information, call the box office at 288-1500 or visit whbpac.org.