A few hours after the news of Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s death began to spread, one of my closest friends called me. I knew before I picked up that he wanted to talk about Warner. We commiserated in low, disbelieving voices. This friend and I were not raised under identical circumstances, but we’d both felt the spectre of “The Cosby Show” ’s Theo Huxtable—easily Warner’s most famous role—hovering over the memories of our childhoods. Theo was funny, cool, affable, confident around adults, often charmingly sneaky, a bit of a trickster. He was always getting into something. He had a troublemaking friend named Walter, whom everybody called Cockroach. The two boys came up with a pretty corny rap to help them understand Shakespeare, which Theo initially thought “wasn’t even written in English.” Great Caesar’s ghost! When he messed up with his girlfriend Justine, he asked his dad for advice and ended up learning how to sing the blues. His room was a godforsaken mess.
Theo’s parents were impressive Black professionals who lived in an impossibly large Brooklyn brownstone, and sometimes he felt—and boldly expressed—the strain of the expectations that followed. In the very first episode of “The Cosby Show,” Theo’s in serious trouble because of his lacklustre grades. Theo, fighting back, gives a long, impassioned speech about how, despite the material successes of his parents—Heathcliff (Bill Cosby) is a doctor, Clair (Phylicia Rashad) a lawyer—he simply wants to be like “regular people.” You know, drive a truck, open a gas station, get his hands dirty, and otherwise embrace a more tactile, grounded way of living. There’s life beyond brownstones.
The speech plays like a moment of rare adolescent wisdom, a brave scolding for an élitist dad. All the kid wanted, classroom performance notwithstanding, was the love and easy acceptance of his folks.
Then his father bursts the warm and fuzzy bubble. “Theo, that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” the doctor bellows. “No wonder you get D’s in everything!” His point is, Yeah, we love you, but, as long as you live here, you’ll work as hard as you can and keep your standards high.
The rest of Theo’s story, across the eight years of “The Cosby Show” ’s run, unfolds like a vindication of that idea. He is eventually diagnosed as having dyslexia, which explains his lifelong struggles in the classroom. Then he goes off to N.Y.U., and later presides over a rowdy after-school program for teens less privileged than himself, often cajoling them with tough-love lectures quite similar to the ones he’d received from his mom and dad.
He was the meritocratic Black boy par excellence. His life story was what the civil-rights movement was supposed to have won. He was a good kid, who ended up using his advantages in life to give a hand to others. He’d persevered. Whenever I’d felt, growing up, that I was letting my mother down, I told my friend, the feeling of shame had often been accompanied by a nagging suspicion that she wished I could be a bit more like Theo.
You could say all of this in another way: Theo Huxtable was a nicely realized character but also a lofty ideal. What he meant was too much for any real person to carry around. Malcolm-Jamal Warner seemed miraculously able to pull it off. He’d been famous and highly visible at an alarmingly young age, but, unlike many other former child stars, he never seemed to feel much rancor about the experience, or resentment about lugging pure-minded Theo around with him for the rest of his life.
When he played roles in shows like “Suits,” “The Resident,” and “Malcolm and Eddie,” you couldn’t help but think about Theo. But that wasn’t a bad thing: it only meant that the archetype that the earlier character had prodded into being was now commonplace in all kinds of representations of reality—that Theo had done the impossibly difficult cultural work of affixing a face upon a new, then suddenly ubiquitous, kind of person.
Warner helped this process along by always comporting himself with an ambassadorial cheer. He knew what he meant. One of “The Cosby Show” ’s unspoken assertions—now much more controversial than in the eighties, when the show premièred—was that polished personal presentation was part of a Black man’s arsenal of tools to survive an unpredictable world. If you could turn problems into laughter, ashes into beauty, misdirections into opportunities to learn, all while remaining a credit to your race, that was success. Probably without meaning to, Warner supported that argument merely by seeming like he’d be fun to meet. He was great at playing Theo, perhaps, because he was genuinely a Theo at heart.
Recently, I was hanging out with some people who are younger than I am by at least a decade and therefore were not raised on the Huxtables—it’s always a shock when I am reminded that there are rent-paying Black adults to whom this description applies. I made a reference that nobody understood. I said the words “Gordon Gartrelle” and watched my buddies’ faces go blank. Nothing!
The reference is to another episode in “The Cosby Show” ’s first season. Theo wants to impress a date—the kid is consistently girl crazy, another reason to relate—and enlists his sister Denise, played by Lisa Bonet, to make for him a knockoff of a shirt by a popular designer of the day, Gordon Gartrelle. Denise plays it off like the task is no big deal; she could do it in her sleep. But, when Theo comes back downstairs wearing the glossy blue-and-gold shirt, all hell breaks loose. The sleeves are mismatched in length, the shoulders are off-kilter, the collar looks like a clown’s. Theo is hilariously enraged. Warner is brilliant: he stomps and rolls his eyes, looks genuinely ready to cry, seems to be visualizing his whole teen-age reputation gone up in unstoppable flames. The shirt is so awful and Warner’s face so Pagliaccian in intensity that the moment resembles something lifted from “I Love Lucy.”
Then something wonderful happens. His date shows up and likes the shirt. Theo, instinctively, plays along, acts like he’s discovered the freshest new style, goes out, has a ball. I think guys my age love this scene because it amounts to a mantra: keep improvising and something decent might just happen. Whenever I say “Gordon Gartrelle,” I’m talking about a comeback victory.
You grow up and end up knowing better. Sometimes a loss is just a loss, and youthful failures can’t always be redeemed by a charming outlook on life. An appealing exterior can’t always ward off the storm. Sometimes the guy who plays your wisecracking dad ends up being a sinister creep. Even a seemingly invincible person like Malcolm-Jamal Warner can die well before his time.
One of the points of the family sitcom is that these facts don’t always matter. Some of the tougher stuff can wait. Maybe the unfair burden of the kid who plays a role in that world is that, when he grows up, people keep looking for that heartwarming spark in his eyes. In May, Warner put out a video on Instagram. All he wanted you to know is that, if you think about it, there’s always a reason to smile. ♦
