While comedian Hannibal Buress' recent stand-up tour brought the multiple rape accusations levied at Bill Cosby to light for most of the general public, Patton Oswalt says that comedians have known for a long time (coincidentally, Tina Fey joked about the allegations in 2005 on Saturday Night Live and again, in 2009, on 30 Rock). Oswalt has openly talked about the Cosby allegations via his own Twitter account, to Huffington Post, and now directly to Nerdist podcast listeners.
On Pete Holmes' You Made it Weird podcast, the comedian segued from jokes about the "lizard brain" making men do evil things, to acknowledging that, “The Bill Cosby thing is so fucking awful. And what’s even worse for comedians is a lot of us have known it for a long fucking time," he said. "It was a very badly kept secret in the comedian world.”
But while many people are still coming to terms that a beloved comedian could've potentially been such a monster, Oswalt wants everyone to consider the victims: “He did the shit he did to these women when they were young and they were on this upswing... They can never talk about it. So he’s just shot the ground out from under them. Not just in that one incident, but for decades of their lives, when they’re supposed to be enjoying the time when they’re in their physical prime and their mental prime, enjoying life... some guy takes that away from them," he said. "He (Cosby) doesn’t lose a second of sleep over it... and they had to sit there for decades while this guy did this over and over again, (and he) didn’t lose any sleep, (and) was (still) beloved.”
On the same podcast, Oswalt even compared Cosby to former president George W. Bush. "Everything is being taken away from him, but at the worst, he lives in comfy seclusion for the last years of his life,” he said. "It's like when George W. Bush finally left office. It was like, 'Guys, you're not going to get your Nixon ending here."
A few days after the episode aired, Cosby's own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was graffitied with the word "rapist". It was replaced on Friday, December 5. The LAPD are searching for the star-tagger, and are also beginning to investigate the allegations against Cosby himself. The number of sexual assault allegations against Cosby has now reached 22.
On Holmes' podcast, Oswalt theorizes that,"That means that there’s hundreds. If you see one cockroach there’s a thousand in your house." And while that number is comically high (he is a comedian), bear in mind that, statistically speaking, only 40% of rapes are reported.
Cosby's lawyer previously released a statement calling the allegations "ridiculous" and "absurd."
[via Nerdist/The Huffington Post]
