Bill Cosby Roast

 
All,
 
Well, I finally produced a video of The 2014 Cosby Roast!
 
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the roast, a former director of both the West Point Glee Club and West Point Alumni Glee Club, William (Bill) H. Cosby, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2014, and we agreed to roast him while he was still with us. The event did NOT go off like clockwork, for reasons explained in this video.
 
My wife recorded the event under low light conditions, and for years, I dreaded looking at her work, for fear that it was unusable.  I finally watched it and, to my delight, I found that it was BARELY usable!  
 
So I spent some time putting lipstick on my porcine product, and here it is.
 
Caveats.
 
This sucker is L-O-O-O-O-N-G (Newsflash: so was the event itself). If you lack the patience to watch it, feel free to return to your dancing cat reels. 
 
Since this is a YouTube video, my recommendation is to hit the Play button, then go walk the dog while a large portion is buffered.  When you return, you can fast forward through the boring stuff.
 
Production values sucked. It was a one-camera shoot under low light conditions, and my wife never saw the script ahead of time (which didn’t really matter, because the A/V guy worked off an earlier version of the script, and very few presenters followed it).
 
As I said, the lighting was poor. It looks like an undercover sting operation just before they discover the guy’s wearing a wire.
 
The audio is poor in some places.  To compensate, I added some captioning just to clarify certain deliveries. If I didn’t caption something and you don’t understand it, feel free to back the recording up and listen as many times as you want. My artillery ears can only accomplish so much when people mumble or talk fast.
 
I did minimal editing of the presentations, and some are, well, more interesting than others. Some are great; others would definitely NOT earn you a fall-out on Steak Night. 
 
I made no attempt to clean up anyone’s presentation, other than to add some captioning here and there.  If we had to suffer through them that night, then you do, too.  At least you have the option of fast forwarding.
 
Those are the caveats. Here are the positives:
 
You get to see some folks that you haven’t seen in a decade.
 
You get to watch Bill enjoying the roast, no matter how “dicked up” the program was.
 
To quote my great, great, great, grand uncle (true), Robert Burns,
 
“The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” 
 
I feel that Uncle Robert was looking over my shoulder that evening and having a good laugh at my expense. At the time, I wasn’t.
 
Now, twelve years later, I can also enjoy a good laugh, too.
 
Tom