why is there air?

to provide a title for one of the best bill cosby comedy albums, perhaps.

when i was a young kid, my mom would take me with her to go visit her best friend. tish had a huge record collection -- all sorts of goodies, and the only representative from the then-modern day was her oldest son's kiss records (which i detested then, and now). the rest were comedy records and old buck rogers radio shows.

i loved those records. i'd lock myself away in the bedroom her sons shared, and listen to the same records, over and over. i always returned to those bill cosby records, because at the time the only thing i knew of cosby was "the cosby show" -- which i thought was funny at the time, but i was only 10 years old at the time. i had no idea he was a stand-up comedian.

they spoke to me in a way that, i imagined, made me oh-so-grownup. i never imagined my friends at school would "get" these jokes, and part of that was my fault, in that i tried to tell, say, the story of fat albert and "buck buck" and made it sound ... well, about how it would sound if a 10 year old told it.

all this came back to me as i read about how jeff foxworthy became the biggest-selling comedy artist of all time. the article does a good job of describing what happened to the comedy album, and why foxworthy is the King of Comedy.