Said Whitney Cummings, on Bill Maher's podcast.
I like this comment over at YouTube: "Bill has been beat at his own game. Whitney is the supreme lord of interrupting and not letting people talk."
I didn't watch the Cosby show. I know the Cosby character was a doctor but did he work out of his basement and take the gloves off in the living room? Where does the comic exaggeration begin and end? I ask Grok.
Office location: Yes, Cliff operated his medical practice out of an office in the basement of the family's Brooklyn brownstone home. This was a recurring element, with scenes showing him seeing patients there (e.g., routine check-ups and consultations). The home's floor plan places the office on the lower level, accessible via internal stairs from the main living areas (like the kitchen and living room) and sometimes via a separate street-level entrance down a short flight of steps. He frequently emerges from the basement into the family spaces after appointments, blending his work and home life.
Gloves in the Living Room: No confirmed scenes show Cliff removing medical gloves specifically in the living room (or implying they were "just inside a woman"). Medical protocols would typically require removing disposable gloves immediately after use in the exam room to avoid contamination. While Cliff is often depicted in medical attire (e.g., lab coat or stethoscope) when transitioning from his office to family areas, the glove detail seems like an embellishment. Extensive searches for episode descriptions, scripts, and fan discussions turned up no matching scenes....
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34 comments:
Yah funny haha…but twas common for Manhattan doctors to have a subterranean office like that. Many of those brownstones in the village have an entrance below the main entry stairs. I remember some blocks where every other house had a Dr. shingle hanging by the downstairs door…
Hide in plain sight: Evil Scientist Boo
I like how Maher swaps in the dining room as the location for the de-gloving and gets the gloves on the table! Cummings only says living room.
The Cosby show only has a few sets. The living room was the most common. I don’t remember a dining room, but I do think the had breakfast room / kitchen area like Family Ties.
I read a precis of one of those friend sitcoms where the guy is a gynecologist and is questioned by a friend whether it affects his love life or if it's like a waitress serving coffee all day coming home and for that reason not wanting a cup of coffee.
rehajm - In the 1980 film Dressed To Kill, didn't the doctor/killer/Michael Caine see patients from the 1st floor brownstone?
Smell the glove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOSAumt6YF4
It's a joke, ann. They're joking, it's edgy. They can do that with a black man. Not with Epstein though, or the other Israeli who was let go recently after soliciting children. If you value Free Speech and the First Amendment, pray the special anti- "anti-semitism" laws fall and we start hearing blood curdling jokes about the IDF, the Jewish proclivities for children, and the gloves are off...
If you like this, wait until the jokes really hit your times. I bet there was a lot of professsorial canoodling that you look away from in your campus days... YOu're oddly silent about your tenured (="protected") campus work in a liberal college that used to photoshop black students in for PR.
Or Dead Ringers, with Jeremy Irons playing twin gynos? They had a fab house, but I don’t remember if the office was part of it.
RR
JSM
The podcast is from last month but Cummings put the clip up on TikTok yesterday: https://www.tiktok.com/@realwhitneycummings/video/7539713301392002334?_r=1&_t=ZP-8yyoqgDNyDm
Some amusing photos added.
That's where I saw it.
In the "Where are they now?" ending to the movie "Animal House," one of the guys is said to have become a gynecologist in Beverly Hills. That was considered very hilarious at the time. Nowadays, I don't think men choose gynecology anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBlN0BCwm-0
It's not the John Belushi character. He becomes a U.S. Senator.
Eric Stratton, "Damn glad to meet you", went on to become a gyno.
Whitney Cummings - I like her. She's quite a talker and funny too. As for Bill Maher, I can never get over his weird appearance. The dwarf body, the stick arms, the big head, and the ugly face.
And when you look like him, his agressive vulgar sexual attitude doesn't help. God, imagine him having sex, its hard not to get a little quesy.
Thank God he hasn't reproduced.
Grew up watching the Cosby Show. It was great. Intentionally about showing a successful and education oriented black family. It was always presented as a consulting office for talking not an examination room.
Im struck that all of his costars always honored and liked him Sadly he dehumanized his victims. But it does seem his real crime for hollywood wasn't what he did to his victims but his strong critique of the Hollywood trend of keeping black people as poor or criminals or ignorant. It was only when he took those stands his crimes were exposed.
I wish all auch crimes were prosecuted so no excuse for him. But that's clearly not the case in Hollywood. So he must still be among the never forgiven.
As for the Crosby show, I never watched it. I remember listening/watching Crosby before he got his show and liking him, but his Sitcom just bored me.
But then I wasn't into TV back then, i had better things to do. The only networks shows I can remember from the 80s were Cheers, Newhart, and Magnum PI.
There was a propaganda element to the crosby show that annoyed me. It was such an obvious attempt to show a middle class black family as role models. Nothing wrong with that, but I had no interest in watching "Father knows best" in blackface.
My MIL used to work as a server (not a bunny) at the Playboy mansion in LA for parties and such; she said Bill Cosby was the nicest celebrity she ever met there. Sigh.
Bill Maher looks too much like Shemp Howard for me to ever take him seriously. Plus, Shemp was funnier.
@rehajm: "My mechanical masterpiece" ......
Agree with Paddy O. Everyone in my family watched that show and enjoyed it. Cosby was a wonderful role model.
...until he wasn't. Which is sad.
It's funny comparing notes about what we remember from that show.
Brownstone basements had a street entrance and it was normal for all sorts of independent professionals to have their office in the basement (doctors, accountants, therapists, etc.)
When he had his reckoning and the show was cancelled to protect us from having to the evil man, dozens of innocent people suffered. One of the actors--Sondra's boyfriend/husband--was out of acting and living off the residuals. He became a bagger at Trader Joe's. But I'm sure he and all the other actors who did nothing wrong were fine with that.
Cosby was prosecuted for the crime of being a black guy with money who liked sex with white women who liked Quaaludes. I partied in those days and nobody forced the women to do the ludes. Me, too, my a$$.
There was definitely a propaganda element - and it was working! I was a high school kid during its run and my white, middle class, Midwestern family used to watch the show every week, not because we were self-consciously trying to counter our implicit biases but because we thought it was funny and liked the characters.
Again, sigh.
My experience of Cosby was the comedy channel on United Airlines in the 60s, between NYC and the west coast. So you have time to do the entire comedy channel.
>rhhardin said...
the guy is a gynecologist and is questioned by a friend whether it affects his love life or if it's like a waitress serving coffee all day coming home and for that reason not wanting a cup of coffee.<
As someone who has done a few thousand or so gynecological and OB exams, I have always found these kinds of notions, born of the popular, inevitable, but ignorant imagination, amusing - and rather appalling. I will tell you - and I'm sure that any fellow MDs here will agree - that but in the minds of a handful of aberrant examiners that you read about once in awhile, there is no mental connection between gyne exams and any personal thoughts or feelings about that particular territory. Good grief - quite the opposite, in fact.
Oh yeah, and the gloves - they go in the bucket beside the exam table, immediately and 100%.
Another fine sitcom was Frank's Place. It started Tim Reid, who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP, as a Boston college professor. He describes himself as the kind of guy who drives a Volvo and watches PBS. He inherits a restaurant/bar in New Orleans, so is a black man who is a fish out of water in Creole society. Hilarity ensues. It is available on YouTube.
Everytime my doctor examines me with gloves on, they go immediately into the trash bin, afterwards. Doubt there are many doctors that walk around after an exam or operation with their gloves still on.
Oh wait, I also watched "Buffalo Bill" with Dabney Coleman and his follow on show "Slap Maxwell" that lasted one season.
Frank's Place......great show.....I spent an afternoon in an Amsterdam Netherlands bar/restaurant with that name back then. It played up the show and allowed patrons to take photos pouring their own beers from taps. Black musicians would stroll in and play......former US residents.
I always thought it was weird that the father on "Growing Pains' had a home office where he saw his patients since he was a psychiatrist.
I had some serious problems with the child abuse on Cosby, by Cliff of Theo so I almost never watched it. Family loved it so I got some exposure. I would have bet $100 that Cliff Huxtable was an architect and that the show was set in the suburbs. Philly or NJ perhaps.
Shows how much attention I paid!
As for the doctor's office in the house, growing up in the 50s in Falls Church, I remember my doctor being in a house. It was a legit doctor's office as I recall no different than if in a medical bldg. Near Seven Corners.
Also, upstate NY our family doctor office was in his house.
I don't think that that that unusual at the time.
John Henry
After Dr. John Watson got married and moved out of 221B Baker St, he lived with his wife upstairs from his practice.
You don't want to know what Cosby was doing in that basement. Another 80s sitcom, "Family Matters," just cut one of the kids out of the show between seasons and never mentioned it again. Maybe she went into Cosby's basement and never came out.
I could never get past the smug, creepy opening credits of the Cosby show. Looking at Cosby, you knew that guy had (or thought he had) some big secret.
I liked Whitney's own sitcom when it was on. Since then, we've all gotten more selective and network fare doesn't appeal like it once may have.
Lots of home medical offices in Europe, at least in the parts I frequent. Last October, driving around the Waterloo campaign sites north of Ligny, we came across a great stone manse--almost a castle-- that sported the shingle of an OB/GYN. (I'm guessing the main structure was 17th C.)
My friend whose daughter is soon to be an OB/GYN insisted that we stop while he took some video to show her. Fatherly encouragement.
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