Cosby's troubles force impersonator to change his act

After nearly three decades, Monty Hall knew it was time - time to retire the Cos. His Bill Cosby impersonation. The anchor of his act. The one people really laugh at. The one that made him stand out.

The public has no stomach for it. Neither does his wife. Neither does he.

Hall, 65, had mostly abandoned the vocal impersonation after the allegations and evidence against Cosby began snowballing, but he had kept the Cosby dance moves. And he had kept his banner. The big blue and orange one his wife, Linda, sewed for him all those years ago, when he left the comedy clubs to perform on the streets. To get noticed. To stand out.

"Monty Hall, Comedian," the banner read. "A Bill Cosby Look-A-Like."

Using the O's in look for eyes, Linda had sewn a Cosbyesque smiley face.

But now it was time for the sign to go, too.

It's like the Bible says: Be not a partaker of another man's sins. If Hall kept doing his Cos, he would be a partaker.

On Wednesday night, as his wife made dinner, he told her: "Linda, I'm just going to be me."

She'd been telling him so.

On Thursday afternoon, he stepped off a Route 33 bus in Center City with his Sony boom box and microphone, made his way to an enclave in front of a retail space for rent on Walnut Street, and folded his banner in half. Now, for the first time in years, all it read was: "Monty Hall, Comedian."

He turned on the microphone and began to tell a story he hoped would garner laughs. His own material, at last.

It had taken Monty Hall 27 years to become himself.

The demise of Hall's homemade banner is perhaps the smallest erasure of Cosby's legacy in a city and a country shedding themselves of the disgraced icon.

Cosby now stands accused of drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women. This month, newly released court records revealed he had admitted giving Quaaludes to a woman he wanted to have sex with.

Since then, plans have been made to scrub a mural on North Broad Street that featured his image. The Gallery removed his image from a display of famous Philadelphians. The president of the United States described the allegations against Cosby as constituting rape.

And Hall no longer displays his banner.

For so long, it had been the center of his act.

There's no denying a resemblance to Cosby, one first noticed in the early '60s, when family members of a girlfriend from his Germantown neighborhood swore that he looked like the then-up-and-coming comic.

Hall laughed. He married Linda. They had eight children. He worked factory jobs, earned his child development associate's credential, and became a preschool teacher. He began his comedy career in the 1980s, as the kids grew older, pulling his material from family life. And did earnest, if shaky, impersonations. Redd Foxx. Johnny Mathis. Archie Bunker. Jamie Farr's Mars Bars commercials.

He developed his Cosby. The voice took time. The dance came easier. Bop, stop, go back - shoulders squared, chest out, work in a little of the Chicken.

With his Cosby, he won laughs at the old Laff House Comedy Club on South Street, he said. He once landed eight minutes on BET, he said.

He kept trying to give Cosby a photo of himself in character as Cosby.

He got close once at the Penn Relays, but, he said, Cosby told him to beat it, using a phrase unprintable in a family newspaper.

He saw him again after a show at the Academy of Music as Cosby was leaving through a side entrance with two women.

"This guy's a pest," he recalls Cosby saying.

And there was the time at the Liacouras Center when Hall shouted to Cosby as he draped a jacket over the shoulders of a young woman accompanying him in his limo.

"Hey, Cos, I read your book, Cosbyology!" he shouted.

"Study it," he remembers Cosby barking before the limo sped away.

He followed the headlines as more and more women came forward. For so long, he had respected Cosby as a craftsman. Now he was disgusted.

"He fooled a lot of people," he said. "I don't want to be associated with him."

On Thursday, after flipping through notebooks of his own material, he was ready to debut his new act.

"Baby, I hope I have a good day today," he told his wife before heading downtown.

After unfolding the banner on Walnut Street, showing just his name, he began with some funny stories about his childhood.

It went better than he expected. People laughed. People put a few bills in his case. It felt like they were liking him for him.

He turned up his boom box and began to dance, keeping a few Cosby moves that he's appropriated over the years, but relying mostly on his own moves now.

After a few hours, he packed up. He wanted to get home to write some new material. Material for the Monty Hall show.