You don't want to get Bill Cosby angry.
And Bill Cosby is angry.
Cosby's ire is focused at the African-American community: its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. You can do better, he exhorts his audiences. Don't let yourself be victims, and especially don't let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.
"This is about little children ... and people not giving them better choices," he told Paula Zahn in an interview for CNN's "Paula Zahn Now." "Talking. Talking. Parenting. Correctly parenting. That's what it's about. And you can't blame other things. You got to -- you got to straighten up your house. Straighten up your apartment. Straighten up your child."
This is not the smiling, avuncular commercial spokesman for Jell-O and Coca-Cola. This is not the wisecracking tennis coach of "I Spy," or the jokey stand-up comedian of "Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow ... Right" and "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With," or the fast-talking guy of "Uptown Saturday Night."
This Bill Cosby is more like the man who told his TV son Theo, "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it" in an early episode of "The Cosby Show."
