Funny How Things Go: Reflections On Fallen Heroes
No word of a lie, two of my biggest child-hood heroes were Bill Cosby and Woody Allen. In grade four my teacher played an LP of Cosby's stand-up routine on the last day before summer break because he had nothing more to teach us and it kept us quiet. That's what got me into him; I think it was The Chickenheart story. So I bought a copy of "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With" a week later (I was nine), and within a year I had collected all his LPs. Woody Allen of course I knew from his early movies, and later his New Yorker pieces. He did stand-up a bit as well, and I collected one or two of his albums, but it was never his thing. They were, I thought at the time, the two funniest men who ever lived. I still think that. And Cosby's racial philosophy was intriguing . And Allen once wrote the truest thing anyone has ever said about the world of post-secondary education: "Don't take anything where they make you read Beowul...