Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile’s victims quiet.… But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable—this can’t possibly be happening. —Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life.

As with Savile and Ghomeshi, the unholy wonder is that Cosby got away with it for as long as he did. Accusations that Cosby had doped women into unconscious submission and taken advantage of them had prickled for years in print and on television, only to recede into the marshes. In 2006, Philadelphia magazine published a long investigation by Robert Huber of the charges against Cosby that bore the arresting title “Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde.” A young woman named Andrea Constand had accused Cosby of drugging and molesting her, Cosby contended the sex was consensual, and no criminal charges were made in this he said/she said. That wasn’t the end of it, however. Constand filed a civil complaint and sued for financial amends. Huber wrote, “It is still Cosby’s no against her yes, except for one difference: Thirteen women are waiting to be deposed in the suit; in a court filing, Constand’s lawyer says that all of them—with nothing to gain, with no payout waiting, with their own statutes of limitations run out—have stories about Bill Cosby as well, and some of them will claim a similar drug-and-fondling M.O.” Amid the uproar over Dylan Farrow’s open letter claiming that she had been molested by her adoptive father, Woody Allen, Gawker’s Tom Scocca did a post in February 2014 that created a momentary stir and acquired a portentous importance in retrospect. Observing that Allen’s “status as an accused child molester [had] been a matter of public record since before Manhattan Murder Mystery came out,” Scocca deduced that anyone who had been paying attention before had filed that awareness away and decided just not to think about it. “Not thinking about it is a popular and powerful choice. Which brings up another beloved American funnyman, Bill Cosby.” Scocca reels off the fond memory associations he and we have with Cosby (the Fat Albert cartoons and Jell-O commercials), touts Cosby’s unimpeachable achievements as a comedian, breakthrough performer, and role model, then gets to the nub: “He’s also someone who has been accused by multiple women of drugging them and sexually assaulting them.” These accusations weren’t confined to the splotchy pages of supermarket tabloids; they appeared in such glossy showrooms as NBC’s Today show and People magazine, so you would have assumed that they’d had some stickiness. Instead they peeled right off. Scocca: “With shocking speed, [the coverage] was effectively forgotten. When the subject came up today,” in February 2014, that is, “more than half the Gawker staff had no memory of any sexual allegations against Bill Cosby.” Well, this is, as Gore Vidal was fond of reminding us, the United States of Amnesia. Then Hannibal Buress lobbed his hand grenade and a nation of Rip Van Winkles was rudely awakened.

Buress didn’t intend to set a tribunal into motion. As he told Howard Stern on Stern’s Sirius radio show, he had been ragging on Cosby in his stand-up act for being a rapist-hypocrite (telling black people to “pull your pants up” while he was dropping his) for months without any reverberations. Only when the riff hit YouTube did the rolling thunder begin. Why did a sloppily shot YouTube clip have a sonic impact greater than a Today-show segment? Some have argued that the voices of Cosby’s female victims were discounted and ignored, credence given to the accusations only when a man made them. I don’t dispute that society allots more weight to male opinion than the personal testimonies of women, but I think something different was in play. It wasn’t Hannibal Buress’s gender that was the crucial factor; it was his position as a comedian. His direct attack on Cosby broke a fraternal taboo. Cosby isn’t just a pantheon figure in popular entertainment; he has also been a fountainhead inspiration to so many younger comics, the venerable master. In the documentary Comedian (2002), Chris Rock regales Jerry Seinfeld with a report of the marathon Cosby comedy show he had just attended. At the end of the film Seinfeld has a papal audience with the Cos. Rock and Seinfeld teamed as the presenters when Cosby was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in 2009. They traded superlatives on the stage of the Kennedy Center about seeing Cosby recently perform two hours of original material—“I’m not that funny,” Rock said, to which Seinfeld responded, “I’m definitely not that funny”—before introducing a vintage clip of a classic Cosby bit. “As the clip ended,” the Associated Press reported, “Cosby turned to his wife, Camille, who smiled and clapped. Cosby later said comedians’ wives often want autopsies of their husbands’ brains to see what’s going on in there.” If Cosby’s wife didn’t know what was going on in there before, she sure does now. We all do, though we may never crack the Enigma code of why Cosby allegedly requested that female staffers at CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman gather round in the greenroom before his appearances to watch him eat curry. That wasn’t something covered in the pages of Krafft-Ebing. Once the Cosby scandal achieved critical mass, his name was merde, summarily removed from the marquee. Late Show canceled his guest-star booking for November 19, denying him one last curry dinner; Netflix (temporarily? permanently?) shelved his commemorative comedy special Bill Cosby 77; NBC iced a sitcom project it had been developing with its former ratings giant; and TV Land timorously pulled reruns of The Cosby Show from its lineup. (Charlie Sheen has a history of violence against women, yet blocks of Two and a Half Men reruns clog the cable dial.) As more tales of doping and groping hit the tabloids, Cosby’s comedy tour was torpedoed with cancellations. It seemed only a matter of time before the white-suited ghost of Mark Twain materialized to demand his humor award back. (Meanwhile, ponder the irony that former boxing champion Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist, has starred in a one-man Broadway show and now has his own absurdist series on Adult Swim, Mike Tyson Mysteries.) Predictably, the news media took a good long squint in the mirror and made the sorry spectacle about their failings, their chicken-liver complicity, as Cosby’s biographer Mark Whitaker and a handful of journalists expressed contrition for not outing Cosby as an alleged serial sexual assaulter earlier. No matter how sincere, mea culpas make for pallid prose. Worse than the press’s making it about “them” was their making it about Us, us being that lumpy mass known as the American people, once again deprived of our depraved innocence. Where have you gone, Dr. Huxtable?—our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo. As woman after woman has come forward to excoriate Bill Cosby (including model Beverly Johnson, who wrote a personal account for VF.com of being drugged at Cosby’s house), there has been growing public revulsion, but also a nagging question: “Did it have to be Cliff Huxtable?” lamented Kate Zernike in The New York Times. “He was America’s Dad,” she wrote, a wilted valentine sentiment seconded by Linda Stasi, a columnist at the New York Daily News: “He’s the father you wanted cutting your Thanksgiving turkey … ” Speak for yourself, sis. I never craved Cos anywhere near the damn turkey. It’s foolish to develop a tender, emotional attachment to a comedian, whose jovial manner often masks the keen wiles of a con artist, even sillier to place your faith in a fictional sitcom character with a fancy sweater collection. I’ve never felt this umbilical-cord connection to Cosby and his comedy. As a kid I listened to his records, as nearly all of us boomers did, but I didn’t dote on them. Redd Foxx’s and Moms Mabley’s raunchy monologues were more my religion. Likewise, the boisterous verbal slapstick and socially conscious editorializing of Norman Lear’s Good Times have held up stronger as comedy and time-capsule material than the parfait charms of The Cosby Show, whose relation to real life seemed strictly incidental.