Congratulations! Now What?: A Book for Graduates - Hardcover

Cosby, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786865725 ISBN 13: 9780786865727

Publisher: Hachette Books, 1999

Synopsis

Just as a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, so a spoonful of humor helps the wisdom go down. In Congratulations! Now What?, America's funnyman Bill Cosby gently ribs college graduates about their time spent--or lost--in the hallowed halls of the university and postulates what four years of higher education have suited them for: "[If no job offer] ever turns up with a four-day week, a three-hour lunch, and a holiday for Count Basie's birthday, you still might be able to make a few dollars on Jeopardy." But he also assures graduates that their studies were not in vain and bestows advice to job seekers. Those who acquired several piercings while in school are cautioned to make sure the studs and hoops are shined before going to an interview. Those who are buffing their first professional résumé are advised to strike a tone somewhere between "lyrical lying and fanciful fraud."

Cosby, whose successful career as a humorist has always turned on his affection for kids, is a regular speaker at college commencements--in the chapter "As I Look Out at Your Foggy Faces," he says it's a hobby of his--and this 130-page book collects bons mots and sage advice from speeches given because he has "a feeling for anesthesiology."Graduates--and their now-broke parents--will find a reason to smile on every page. --Brenda Pittsley

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Cosby (Time Flies, etc.) is a frequent college commencement speaker. This slim yet padded book aims to reach those graduates and their families who haven't gotten an in-person visit. For someone who has a doctorate degree, however, Cosby exhibits a relentlessly dismissive view of higher education, offering a series of riffs, asides and dialogues about the futility of college and about graduates' incapacity to face the real world. Many of the jokes are plain dumb: "For these four years, you've been asking the Big Questions: Why doesn't this campus have HBO?" Then there are the comedian's projection of worthless future college courses: "An Introduction to Crazy Eights" or "Communications 101: Use of the Telephone." Sometimes Cosby's advice is helpful, as when he describes how urban studies classes don't teach about how much a landlord requires from a new renter ("security deposit, a credit check, a Sam's Club card, a urine sample... "). And there are a few inspired lines, as in how a student can work his way through college, "but only if he has the Viagra concession in the faculty lounge." Cosby has done better, in more personal books like Fatherhood. Still, the inevitable audio version of this book may be charming. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

As the old '60s comedy troupe Firesign Theater declared, "We're all bozos on this bus." Perhaps we never feel more like bozos than when graduating college without the faintest blip of a permanent job on the radar screen. Cosby knows this, and he knows the analogous bozodom of parents who find that it is always somebody else's graduate who went directly into an annual salary twice as big as Pop's whole retirement package. Much of his little book of, uh . . . consolation, maybe, is set in little dialogues between a bozo graduate and a bozo parent. The recurring topics of conversation are epitomized by two questions, the graduate's "How about a loan?" and the parent's "How about you get a job?" Undercurrents of complaint about the high cost of college education, the low quality of same, and the slovenly habits of college students ebb and flow throughout, and now and then, there comes some halfhearted, mordant advice (so called) from parent to graduate about resumewriting, job interviewing, and moving out (please! please!). It is all as drolly charming as anything Cosby has ever done. No comedian knows better how to speak the worst fatalisms and reduce an audience to tears of both laughter and sentiment. Fine, fine humor. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0786865725
• ISBN 13: 9780786865727
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144