Watch Judd Apatow Skewer Bill Cosby With Perfect Impression
Trainwreck director Judd Apatow visited The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Monday night to do something he hadn’t done in roughly 23 years: Perform stand-up. For the first time since he was 24, Apatow went onstage to do four minutes of comedy, and while a portion of his routine was dedicated to the home life that inspired This Is 40, he also used his stand-up return to eviscerate Bill Cosby.
“Bill Cosby is still out on the road. Isn’t that weird? He’s, like, doing stand-up. What do you think his act is like,” Apatow asked before launching into his astonishing Cosby impression. “Have you ever been in trouble with the wife? You ever get in the doghouse with the wife because of something that you did? Like the other day, there was something about me in the paper and I didn’t want my wife to read the paper, so I got up at 5 in the morning and snuck out to the driveway to get the paper. And I hid the paper. And the next day I got up and I hid the paper. And the next day, I forgot to get the paper!”
It’s not just Apatow’s ability to mimic Cosby’s voice that’s impressive; the Knocked Up director, like any student of comedy, is well-versed in Cosby’s unique standup phrasing and pacing, making Apatow’s routine even more impressive. “And my wife, she said to me, ‘What is this in the paper about the raping and the drugging and the women?’ And I said, ‘Do you like your life? Do you like the house? The jet? Then have a cappuccino and shut the floyk up,” Apatow said in concluding his impersonation of the vehemently anti-cursing Cosby.
In Apatow’s Rolling Stone interview, he discussed why he has so actively targeted Cosby on social media. “The Cosby thing I took seriously because I know one of the victims, who is not going to come forward,” Apatow said. “I had a personal connection to it, where somebody that I care about said that’s exactly how it went down. Obviously you have to make sure things are true. Everything everyone says isn’t true. But if you don’t believe women or take their accusations very, very seriously, women will not speak up. And if women don’t speak up more women will be raped. So it’s really all about preventing other people from getting hurt, because Cosby’s on tour.
“I don’t know if it’s that we just don’t want to believe terrible things happen, especially when people we love are accused — like, How can my favorite person in the world do it? It’s much easier not to believe the accuser. With Cosby, for a while people were thinking, ‘They’re all gold diggers,'” Apatow added. “And at some point, enough women came forward that the world knows this happened and that he is clearly some sort of sociopath.”