Bill Cosby was good at his job, and that's why Cliff Huxtable was his "sickest joke"

The New York Times

"If a sexual predator wanted to come up with a smoke screen for his ghastly conquests, he couldn’t do better than Cliff Huxtable," says Wesley Morris of the iconic The Cosby Show character that made Cosby "America's Dad." In reacting to Cosby's sexual assault conviction, Morris says Cosby being good at his job is why his downfall is so depressing — "depressing," he says, "not for its shock but for the work the verdict now requires me to do. The discarding and condemning and reconsidering — of the shows, the albums, the movies. But I don’t need to watch them anymore. It’s too late. I’ve seen them. I’ve absorbed them. I’ve lived them. I’m a black man, so I am them." Morris adds: "Cliff was affable, patient, wise, and where Mrs. Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad) was concerned, justly deferential. His wit was quick, his sweaters roomy and kaleidoscopic. He could be romantic. Cliff should have been the envy of any father ever to appear on a sitcom. He was vertiginously dadly. Cliff is the reason for the cognitive dissonance we’ve been experiencing for the last three or four years. He seemed inseparable from the man who portrayed him."

ALSO:

• Janice Dickinson reacts to the verdict: I just want him to "rot in hell"
• Revisiting how Hannibal Buress' standup bit helped take down Cosby
• Buress has previously expressed discomfort with his role in the Cosby allegations: “I was just doing a joke at a show," he said on his 2016 Netflix special. "I didn’t like the media putting me at the forefront of it. They were sly, dissing me in the news."