Sitcom Dads, and a Writer Who's an Idiot

I fell into this article about sitcom dads sometimes becoming a sort of proxy dad for millions of kids who grew up staring at the tv screens while waiting for their parents to come home, and obviously when talking about tv sitcom black families & their father figures the famous Fresh Prince of Bel Air scene with Will’s father showing up after years is gonna come up but now I’m distracted by this:

The writer mentions The Cosby Show several times throughout and EVERY TIME goes out of their way to let you know they think the show's terrible; I can understand this coming from an "okay, Bill Cosby’s a sexual predator monster so I don’t really feel the need to give him any love” point of view, but “not funny”?

Fresh Prince holds up incredibly well on rewatch not only because it’s funny, but because it taps into the desire most Americans have for a strong family.

The same, obviously, can be said about The Cosby Show. The reason I hate The Cosby Show is that very few creative decisions on the show were made because they were entertaining choices. They were made because they were choices that made the Huxtables look like a Good Black Family. I have never had a conversation with anyone who remembers The Cosby Show fondly as an entertaining show. Being like the Huxtables has become synonymous with having your shit together, sure, but the show wasn’t particularly funny.

That bolding at the end is my old bolding at the end and let me just say this: FUCK YOU; you've instantly revealed to everybody that you have no idea what funny really is - Bill Cosby was so funny that he pretty much ruined the whole “Just wait until your father comes home he''s gonna beat your senseless!” nonsense BECAUSE he couldn't help but be hilarious:

So it always cracks me up on sitcoms when the father is a funny, goofy gentle sort, always kidding around with the kids and being silly, and one of the kids does something to get himself in trouble and we gotta go through the motions of "Dad's gonna kill me!!!!!" Siblings laughing, "wait til Dad get's home, you're DEAD!!" Really? I haven't seen this dad be mean once in all the seasons, he's usually always trying to be funny. You're really scared of this person? And then when you see the father find out, and the kid is cringing, awaiting the father to kill him...and the father starts cracking jokes et al. Now me, even to this day, if I fuck up and the person who should be pissed starts laughing instead of yelling, I enjoy this much better and indeed try to add as many laughs as possible. But on these sitcoms, the kids are required to act chagrined they're getting laughed at, acting pissed/embarrassed. Instead of "thank god, I'm gonna live!!" they almost challenge the father to punish them. Whack.

The worst offender of this is my show of shows, "The Cosby Show." How many times did we hear "ooooooh, dad's gonna KILL you when he finds out!!!!" only to have Cliff stroll in, look serious, and then riff for 5 minutes at the kid's expense? Not once did my father do that; before being punished I was never treated to a few minutes of him warming up for his Catskills Tour. "...a D in geography, son? can you not locate your brain on a map?" (cue laugh track, bowl of butter pecan appears.)