By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
With Bill Cosby facing multiple allegations of drugging and raping young women during his long career, local man Kyle Thompson hasn’t been able to find a suitable context in which to make use of his well-practiced impression of the comedian without seeming tasteless.
“It always kills at parties,” complained Thompson, wishing that the comedian would have considered those who have put “serious work” into their impression of him before he drugged and raped all those women.
“The last time I did it, all I got was silence, with some nervous chuckles too, but it mostly flopped,” said Thompson. “At one point I went for broke and made a date-rape joke with the voice, and it did mostly go over, but I felt kind of weird about it afterward, so I haven’t done it since.”
“It’s a shame, it really is,” said Tobin Davis, who once heard Thompson perform the bit at a party, describing the impression as “pretty spot-on” and “almost uncanny.”
Thompson admitted that he also does have decent Pee-Wee Herman, Professor Farnsworth, and Barack Obama impressions in his repertoire, but he was “really banking on the Cosby” to keep parties lively.
“Someone pointed out that if I just add a really gravelly quality to the Cosby impression, I’ll have a pretty okay Louis Armstrong, but it’s just not the same.”
Thompson is entertaining the idea of really buckling down on his Al Pacino, but fears that the aging actor is no longer the cultural touchstone he once was.
“Cosby’s particular brand of charming, fatherly gibberish is timeless,” said Thompson. “But I guess that was before we found out about all the rape.”
Bill Cosby could not be reached for comment.
