Read the transcript for the stand-up comedy special 'To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With' (1968) by Bill Cosby on Comedy Buff. Track transcripts ready: 1/1.

Thank you. Appreciate it. This is a very, very beautiful place here, I must say. Very beautiful. Is it alright? Up top there? Not you guys down here. To the $1 people up there. I was a heck of a football player in my time, man. That was before face guards, as you can tell. Yeah, that was the time they called me "Out of bounds Cosby". Either I made a touchdown or I went out of bounds, Jack. I wasn't standing around waiting for nobody to hurt me.
You know, a lot of people laugh at you if you have good sense. But my mother loved me for that. My mother always said, "Look, if they're going to hurt you, run out of bounds." And that's what I did. I ran out of bounds. Stayed out of bounds. Even when I was playing baseball, I'd come up the back, standing out of bounds. Because pitchers try to hit you. They try to hurt you. You know that, don't you?
When you play baseball and you've got to stay in there, because the guy throws a curve ball at you, it may break across the plate. So you have to stay in there. You don't want people to think you're chicken and you jump out of the box. And it's a weird feeling to be standing there in the box and see that ball coming at you. And your mind says, "Stay in there." But your body says, "We've got to move."
And all of a sudden, man, you know that ball is not going to break. Right in the back. Knocks all the wind out of you. And you can't breathe. Another pin over. Umpire says, "Take your base." "Yes, sir." And you walk down the first base and you still can't breathe. And you get the first base. And you look at the third base coach and he's giving you the steel side. And the pitcher goes into the stretch and he throws the ball and you walk to second base.
And they tag you out and you say, "Thank you very much." Yeah. Of course, there's a whole conflict going on. Of course, there's a whole conflict going on between mind and body anyway. For instance now, the mind is weird. It digs to just look at things that are going to hurt the body. For instance, if you're walking someplace and it's dark and a guy jumps out of an alley. Like your body is ready. Already the body has turned.
Ready to make it. But the head is still looking at what it was. You know? And the body says, "Hey, don't be looking at that. Let's watch out for the poles shooting up out of the ground." Mind and body. Don't get along at all. It is the mind that says to the body or to the hand, "Don't turn that light on when you got to walk from the bedroom to another room and it's pitch black." That's weird, man.
You should have more sense than that. But the mind is really egotistical. "I know my way around this house. Don't turn that light on." And the hand says, "What?" He says, "I said, don't turn the light on. I know my way around." Meanwhile, the toes are saying, "Hey, no. Turn the light off." Turn the light on. Will you please? I'm not going through this again. I have two daughters. Two. One is two. The definition of a two-year-old is any child with a right hand reach of eight feet.
Man, I'm telling you, no matter what I move away from her, she can still get at it from the position she's standing in. That arm grows and grows and grows. You ever feed a two-year-old? Two-year-olds are ball makers. They sit down and take all the food, potatoes, string beans, and the steak, and they roll it up in a ball. All of it goes into a ball. Then they hand it to you. Hey, Dad, you want some?
No, not if you don't want Dad to throw up. You don't want me to bite me. One-year-old. I have a one-year-old. She's a circle maker with the food. Right away, picks her spoon up, no matter what it is. Round and round and round and round. It goes in a circle. And a one-year-old never puts food in its mouth. They are fed by their own way, which is the mashing method. They mash it into the- mashed potatoes mash in through the brain down to the stomach.
All peas and green things go in the ear by that way. Meat goes in the neck. All milk slides down the chest and into the belly button where it is sucked up. And you get into games with two-year-olds, man. They burn your life right out, man. You can keep doing the same joke for a two-year-old for three years, man. They're laughing away. You make that mistake, man. As a parent, I made that mistake. I used to make it with other people's children.
You know, I'd come in and I'd do a thing like maybe a one-and-a-half back flip with a somersault and crawl around the room real fast, right? And I'd do that. Which takes an awful lot of energy. And the kid's like, "Ahhhhh!" Do it again. And so you still get a lot of energy and you say, "Ahhhhh!" And you run around and "Ahhhhh!" Do it again. Well, you try that. You do that five times and you're dying.
"Ahhhhh!" Do it again. Get out of here, kid. I'll punch you right in the face. See, your hostility comes out. One-year-olds know how to destroy grown people. One-year-old, man. My daughter knows when I'm sleeping on the sofa how to pick that ash tree up and drop it right on my forehead. And I wake up and look and there's that smile. You ever hear a one-year-old talk to you? And I talk right back to her.
And I talk right back to her. And she says, They're cursing at me. I know it. Because I never hear her talking to her two-year-old sister. They don't sit there and say, When they're playing, they don't say anything. And whenever the one-year-old gets upset, she just says, "Ahhhhh!" You know, and cries. But when she comes over to me, it's always, I think she's calling me names, man. Because she smiles a lot when she does it.
My daughter Erica, talking now. My daughter Erica, talking now. Just... "Oh, Dad, you gonna go to school?" "No, I've graduated." "You gonna go to school?" "No, I've graduated." "Dad, you gonna go to school?" "No, I've graduated." "You gonna go to..." "Well, that's three, four hours of that." "Hey, you gonna go to school?" "No, I've graduated." "Hey, you gonna go to school?" "No, I've graduated." "Hey, you gonna go to school?"
"No, I've graduated." "You gonna go to school?" "Get out of here." "Why don't you talk to me like that for, Dad?" "I didn't say nothing to you." "Where did that come from?" "I don't know." "You gonna go to school?" "No, I'm not going to school." Beautiful. "Of course, it's my wife's fault." "I wanted, you know, sons." "And she'd come up with these two losers." "Now, see, the reason for it is, it isn't that I don't like girls."
"I love girls." "I love little girls." "Little baby girls." "I love tall girls." "Love girls." "Love, love, love." "Girls." "But, I know what boys are after." "And I know that boys are basically nasty." "So, it means one thing." "Pretty soon, they're gonna be coming after me." "And the kids coming up to my house looking for my daughters." "They're gonna be in trouble, Jay." "You know, like now, I don't mind my daughters wearing bikinis."
"I put a bikini on Erica, she looks so cute walking around, with the little thing up top and the thing down the bottom and her diaper hanging down." "She looks cute, you know." "But as soon as she starts to bloom, man, you can forget them bikinis, Jack." "She's gonna wear four pair of long overalls." "Any time she wants to go swimming." "Long overalls, Jack." "Into the water." "First kid comes within 20 feet of her."
"What'd you shoot him for?" "I thought it was a shark, I'm sorry, I don't know." "Yeah." "I had a guy teach my daughters how to swim." "I paid a guy some good bread to do that." "And he came up, he says, 'Let me take the two-year-old, picked her up, threw her right into nine feet of water." "I said, 'Hey, uh, my daughter's down there, at the bottom of the pool. I think she's drowning, because the water bubbles are coming up, you know."
"Help!" "He says, 'Yeah, I just want to see if she can swim.' "I said, 'Well, the water bubbles are getting smaller, sir, you want to try and do something about that?' "Yeah, okay." "Punch." "And he comes up with Erica, and Erica's called 'Ugh!'" "He said, 'Well, that's the only way you can teach them how to swim, is just throw them in, and then, you know, watch them do their movement, and then guide them along, and they're gonna cough, they're gonna 'Ugh!'" "So forth and so on, but..."
"I said, 'Well, I can't watch that man, you go ahead and teach her how to swim, will you?'" "So, about three weeks later, the guy came back, he said, 'I've taught her how to swim, you want to see it?'" "I said, 'Yeah.' "So, little Erica got up, you know, with the bikini on, and the thing, and dove in, and she went swimming, just swimming real cute, you know, on down, touched the edge, and she swam on back, you know, touched the edge, and she came back to me and pulled herself out and grabbed my leg."
"You know, little girls love to grab your leg." "They put the head, you know, that's love right there, you know, and I said, 'Oh, that's really groovy, yeah, really groovy." "So the guy says, 'How do you like it?'" "I said, 'Well, beautiful, I dig it, man, it's wonderful, you taught her how to swim.'" "He said, 'Now I want to teach this one.' "I said, 'Aaron, Aaron can't even stand up, she just crawls around, the only time she stands up is when she wants to hit me in the head with an ashtray."
"He said, 'No,' he said, 'Look,' he said, 'That's the groovy motion right there, that thing that she's doing just like that, you know, like the crawling motion, that's actually swimming, 'cause, you know, if you remember Darwin's theory and all that, this is a swimming motion.' "I said, 'Prove it.'" "So he picked her up, put her in a box of sand, and Aaron's just swimming across the sand, man, really cool, swimming across the sand."
"I said, 'Okay, well, that's pretty groovy, yeah.'" "He picked her up and he threw her in nine feet of water, 'Poosh.'" "Believe it, I'm telling you, she started doing that swimming, man, right on swimming, really cool, at the bottom of the pool, with the water bubbles coming up." "Help!" "Thank you." "Thank you." "Read your Bible." "The Bible states, first, there was Adam and Eve, two lovely people, running around the garden together."
"And they're really grooving, you know." "Now, Adam is the man. The man remains constant. constant he is always see that's the man see now the woman remains constant but she's always come here come here come here come here okay get away get away come here come here come here come here come here come okay to get away get away get away you know and the guy is always i'll do anything i'll do anything anything you say eat these mud pies oh yes i love them here eat this tree meanwhile she's here come here come here get away get away get away see so she was fooling with adam i know what went on man i know women i married a woman and i know what's going on i know man that she was saying to him oh you come here and then she ran out of things for him to go around eating see couldn't figure out what she would have for him to eat see so then she pulled the apple off knowing that she was out of line bit it punch then really she was uptight and he's over there she said here bite this apple he said yeah crunch next thing you know there's the lord okay everybody out of the pool out out get out everybody and i don't know how many of you here happen to be the only child bang your hands together all right okay not too many of you and some of you don't know if you're the only child but you always because i was the oldest see and whenever i wanted to i would turn around and punch the youngest one what'd you do that for nothing because dad hit me three months ago over you now we lived in the projects two bedroom apartment in the projects with beautiful linoleum floors we had a wood linoleum floor we had a rose linoleum floor groovy for shooting marbles on a rainy day man you got to know how to shoot on linoleum marbles is or else your marbles will go under the piano never let your marbles go under the piano man because then you can't pick it up or nothing pianos are very heavy to p