Cosby has been on television for so long, usually in rather silly sitcoms or commercials for Jello, it's easy to forget that he used to be funny -- and hip! In the 1960s and early '70s, school kids of any color could recite material they'd heard on Cosby's best-selling comedy albums, and it wasn't dorky to do so ... it was cool.

Cosby dropped out of high school to go into the Navy. After his tour of duty, he earned his equivalency diploma through a correspondence course, and his quick legs got him into Temple University on a track-and-field scholarship when he was 23. He dropped out of Temple to pursue his show-biz career.

His early stand-up started with nightclub routines about "Fat Albert" and "Old Weird Harold." The albums led to several hot-selling comedy albums in the 1960s, and appearances on all the prime time variety shows (Dean Martin, Andy Williams, etc.) and Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.

Cosby had never worked as an actor, but NBC brass noticed that his appeal was broader than just black and white. So Cosby was hired to play a smart, sexy spy opposite Robert Culp in the mid-1960s adventure show I Spy. For three seasons, it was enjoyable entertainment, but it was also an important breakthrough -- no black man had ever starred in an American TV show before. And the few blacks who had been seen on television were usually butlers or bumbling bus drivers. Cosby's character, by contrast, was a Rhodes scholar, and Culp's equal partner in espionage.

After I Spy ended, Cosby starred as a gym teacher in his first sitcom, The Bill Cosby Show, then hosted his own The New Bill Cosby Show variety hour, and later a sketch comedy show called Cos. His cartoon series, Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids, ran from 1972-80, and has aired in reruns ever since.

The 1970s also saw Cosby's only success on the big screen, starring with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte in Uptown Saturday Night; with Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel in Mother, Jugs, and Speed; and with Richard Pryor in California Suite. Since then, virtually every movie project Cosby has starred in has been a failure, usually a dismal failure. His duds include Leonard Part VI with Joe Don Baker (the title, making it sound like a sequel, was one of the better "jokes"), Ghost Dad, and a live-action film of Fat Albert.

But Cosby didn't need movies to remain a star. In the 1980s, he starred in The Cosby Show, a wildly popular sitcom with Cosby as a doctor and Phylicia Rashad as his wife, a lawyer. In its second season, episodes of The Cosby Show accounted for 13 of the year's 15 highest rated TV programs. The show was funny, the kids were cute, and the plots contained no sex, swearing, or even hints of vulgarity. The series, though, was eventually criticized for its upper-class setting and its correspondingly looong distance from the real problems faced by real African-Americans.

Cosby has given many millions of dollars to everything from political candidates (Cosby likes 'em progressive and black) to underwriting Spike Lee's film Malcolm X when the studio balked at cost overages. He has also written several folksy books of humorous but good advice, including Fatherhood, Love and Marriage, and Time Flies.