People

It has been a while since Bill Cosby regaled audiences with stories of how he, Fat Albert and friends careened their way around parental authority to enjoy the gooey fruits of childhood. Cosby, 48, has grown some since (and his audiences have grown even more). Right now his comic focus is on how adults survive having kids. Thus the blurb makers, with more cause than usual, have dubbed him "America's Favorite Father." And just in time for Father's Day, | by no marketing coincidence, Cosby is out with a spanking-new best seller that rollicks through his mostly tried and mostly true routines on being a parent.

"A baby sells itself and needs no advertising copy," advises the author. And so, at $14.95 apiece, will Fatherhood. But just in case, Doubleday has planned a $300,000 promotion campaign, and will swamp stores with a first printing of 750,000 copies. Featuring an introduction and afterword by Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, the Harvard psychiatrist and script adviser on Cosby's hit TV series, the 192-page parental primer is already a Literary Guild selection. A new comedy album, called Those of You With or Without Children, You'll Understand, will be released shortly, to boost and be boosted by the book.

Cosby seems to have built a whole career around children. His first bounce to TV fame on I Spy in the mid-'60s involved no kids. But almost all the other high points have involved his uncanny ability to get back down into the wild mind of a child. Cosby made his comedy mark by relating the foibles of his Philadelphia youth on hit albums like 1965's Why Is There Air? In the '70s, he turned Fat Albert into a Saturday cartoon series, and his kiddie- conscious commercials for big-time sponsors like Jell-O helped earn him one of the ad world's highest Q (positive-recognition quotient) ratings, a rank he still holds. In his first solo TV series, he played a high school coach; it ended after only two seasons, in 1971, but by the '80s he got the formula perfectly tuned to the popular funnybone. After raising five children of his own, Cosby in his concerts was increasingly inspired by the bemusement of fatherhood. And it all came together in Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, the beleaguered, loving father of five, who is at the center of NBC's The Cosby Show, one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history. The show's enormous popularity, Cosby has said, was "a major, major step, not just for the American people but for those who control what goes on the air. The truth is in the numbers, and this helps straighten out the nonbelievers concerning what an American audience will watch."

Much of that audience will probably be reading Fatherhood. They will get what they expect, including a fair measure of out-loud laughs. Cosby is still mystified about the motives for baby making ("a kind of erotic arts and crafts"), and he disdains overtly proud dads who believe "mere fertilization is a reason for the high five." Interfamilial wars particularly stir his | juices. "Always end the name of your child with a vowel," he counsels, "so that when you yell, the name will carry." The generations must ever gap. "No matter how he talks, a father cannot sound hip to his children." But he has to hang in there. A father must "never say, 'Get the kids out of here, I'm trying to watch TV.' If he ever does start saying this, he is liable to see one of his kids on the 6 o'clock news." Should all this seem a little familiar, that is Cosby's point. Fatherhood has changed, but not that much. The Library of Congress has cataloged the new book under "Fathers--Anecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc." That gets it about right.